Our Living World Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
The first episode of Our Living World is about “Nature’s Amazing Network,” and we see the rhino making its way through that Nepalese city in order to get to its feeding grounds; of course, the vegetation in those feeding grounds are there because of that network. In the Arctic, a baby reindeer is protected from predators like wolves by its mother and the herd, and the activity of the herd and wolves running makes for an even, reflective snowy surface for the light from the sun.
That helps the surface of the ocean freeze, with warmer waters circulating underneath. That flow affects the tropical coral reef, where we see a cuttlefish in an egg protect itself from predators while seeing the world outside its transparent bubble.
The ocean’s flow affects the formation of clouds and storms, with lightning splitting molecules and generating nitrates that replenish nutrients in the soil when it rains. In other examples, a cougar maintains order in the rainforest; without the big cat’s hunting activities, its grazing prey would decimate the vegetation. When it attacks and kills a crocodile, the carcass it leaves behind provides nutrition to the fungi that feed the root systems, and on and on it goes.
Our Living World is chock full of spectacular photography, with some interesting closeups of things that we wonder how the filmmakers were able to catch. A good instance of this is when two hippopotamuses fight each other in a territorial dispute. There are up-close scenes of the hippos grappling with each other, with each of their powerful jaws getting jabs in as water flies around them. There are closeups of insects in the rainforest, the aforementioned cuttlefish eggs, and other rare finds. It’s the kind of show that takes a lot of coordination between producers and the various nature filmmakers who captured this varied footage.
What we strained to understand is the connections the producers made to rocket from location to location. We admire the scope of Our Living World, where the producers try to show how the actions of a species on one side of the world affects species on the other. Sometimes the connections that Blanchett explained in her reverent, at times mildly snarky narration made lots of sense and was fascinating to learn about. At others, the thread of how two regions were connected was hard to follow, and felt like the filmmakers were somehow stretching to make a connection in order to link two disparate scenes together.
Other episodes will talk about things like timing, and how the rhythms of the seasons affect species, and the affect of climate change. The final episode will talk about the rebalancing of an ecosystem after poaching and wildfires left things out of whack. What we’re hoping for is that there will be less straining to make connections in those episodes and more straightforward storytelling that accompanies the fantastic footage.
