One Strange Rock
produced by Nutopia in conjunction with Darren Aronofsky,
National Geographic 2018
Hosted by: Will Smith,
Astronauts: Chris Hadfield, Nicole Stott, Jeffrey A. Hoffman, Mae Jemison, Leland Melvin, Mike Massimino, Jerry Linenger, and Peggy Whitson.
Hmm. American documentary hosted by Will Smith. That didn’t sound very promising. I know nothing of Smith the man, but none of his movie characters were intellectual giants. The Fresh Prince of Belle Aire is going to lecture me on natural history? Gosh, I don’t know about that.
And good American documentaries are pretty rare. Or rather, the good ones are buried in a ton of crap, the stuff on cable TV where they take 10 minutes of dubious facts and unhinged speculation and puff it up to 42 minutes by repeating everything three times and showing the same cheesy CGI sequences a dozen times. Only to reveal at the end that scientists are actually skeptical that the rotted remains of a fishing boat found in the mud in the shallow waters of the Sea of Galilee was the very one Jesus floated in to do his loaves and fishes miracle. It’s nature for the simple-minded, made by the flat-out stupid.
I’m happy to report my expectations on One Strange Rock were dead wrong. One Strange Rock is excellent, at times approaching the levels of Cosmos or Attenborough’s work. Smith is a capable narrator who understands his topics, and he is backed by eight astronauts who put in tours on the International Space Station and who lend their perspectives quite well to the nature of Earth and its relation to the rest of the Universe.
The central thesis is that multicellular life, and the amazing changes it has made to the planet, may be unique, or at best extraordinarily rare. Earth is extraordinary, the odds against it existing as it is nearly infinite, and it is, in fact, one strange rock.
The camera work is as good as anything you’ll see in an Attenborough series, and I guarantee that in any of the ten episodes there will be at least three scenes that make you gasp and say “wow!” There are CGI sequences, but they’re reasonably restrained and not there to distract the viewer from noticing the ten minutes of mindless garbage a typical cable documentary offers.
I learned stuff watching this. Useful, solid science. For example, I had no idea how big a role lichen had in terraforming the Earth, or where that gorgeous golden beach sand mostly comes from. (It’s fish shit, people. Reflect on that the next time the kids want to bury you in it). And that was just one episode.
The astronauts are uniformly personable and engaging. I knew to expect that from Hadfield and Jemison, but they ALL were interesting, articulate and worth hearing. Some of the best sequences dealt with how being in space unanimously altered their relationship and sense of place in their home world, and how they came to think of themselves as ‘Earthlings’.
The series is an agreeable mix of natural science, natural history, cultural anthropology, biology, marine science, climatology and cosmology. It doesn’t shy away from difficult concepts, and it doesn’t condescend with the easier ones. It made for some terrific television.
Now on Netflix.