Cheetahs forced to cross roiling rivers, owls battered by storms – the tone of this look at how extreme weather affects animals is all a bit disaster movie. Subtle, it is not.
What the show is about
Three years in the making, this six-part documentary focuses on the impact of such “extreme weather events” on the planet’s animals. The gist? They’re stuffed. Or are at the very least in terrible trouble. What to do? “When nature turns against them,” declaims narrator Andrew Lincoln, “they’re not just enduring … they are fighting back. These animals are … a FORCE OF NATURE!” Cue a dramatic montage of climate-battered creatures.
Examples of extreme weather
There are elephants up to their trunks in churning storm water. There is a lizard clinging to a plant stalk as it’s blown sideways by a gale. There is, inevitably, a polar bear floating mournfully into the distance on a small disc of ice. These scenes are accompanied by disembodied snippets from global news reports – each a ghostly transmission from Doom FM. “West Africa’s worst heatwave in living memory,” rumbles one. “Arctic is warming at around three times faster than the rest of the globe,” booms another.
Critique of the tone
It’s all a bit late-90s Hollywood disaster movie, a bit Earth Song; the thunderous soundtrack and shots of crashing waves and sorrowing elephants adds up to a vision of catastrophe that offers little room for subtlety. Instead, we get a closeup of chimps holding hands and Lincoln doing italics to the final three words of every sentence, a maddening quirk that makes it doubly difficult to take lines such as “When water is hard to come by, peace … turns to violence” seriously. Still, the photography is tremendous.
Focus on cheetahs in Kenya
Off we go to Kenya, where cameras capture the dreadful majesty of the skies as they wreak record-breaking havoc on a pair of cheetah siblings in the flood-struck Maasai Mara national reserve. It’s quite something. There are clouds that look like fists and clouds that cock their leg over cricket grounds. Cheetahs don’t have umbrellas. They just stand there looking drenched and miserable, like sulky teens at a bus stop. The flood waters continue to rise, so the brothers are forced to cross a roiling river to reach antelopes. It’s a poignant sight, the swimming-averse cats bobbing through the water like chickens through wallpaper paste. “The bigger the storm, the greater the heroes,” weeps Lincoln as the cheetahs reach the other side.
The owls' story
Back in South Dakota, the owls emerge from their storm-burrow, wobbly but alive. Phew. Whether they can endure another five episodes of Lincoln’s italics remains to be seen. Force of Nature aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.
