Jonathan Hill

I couldn’t help wondering what the target audience is. It seems to be pitched for adults, especially with the CGI creatures eating each other and so on. It would be pretty scary for children. And yet the earth sections - which make up the bulk of it - are so incredibly simplistic, they’d be more at home on CBBC, apart from the superb production values. The basic idea of mingling speculative alien evolution with terrestrial parallels is sound, but it’s undermined by the sometimes very weak links between the material. We watch baby flying animals scramble past predators to get to the cliff edge so they can launch themselves into the air, like baby turtles rushing to the sea. So why is this followed by a lengthy segment about young meerkats learning to eat scorpions? The narrator talks about how life is tough for young animals, but (a) WE KNOW THIS and (b) the situations are entirely different. It’s a shame because the production values are so high, the imagined worlds look magnificent, and the narration is excellent, but it all adds up to a pretty boring experience consisting mostly of very basic mini-nature documentaries, punctuated by tantalising glimpses of imagined planets.