Strange Days on Planet Earth - Review
Strange Days on Planet Earth: Invaders
This is one of the first of the multi-part Strange-Days series.
Around the globe scientists are racing to solve a series of mysteries. Unwelcome visitors, rising diseases, deformed creatures and global rising of seawater are entering the news from all over the planet at an alarming rate. Scientists believe that we are in a period of change unmatched in the history of the planet. Are these occurrences isolated events or are these clues beckoning us to solve a larger puzzle that is happening on this planet? In every sense, "Strange Days" pushes the boundaries of what natural history films are. It poses questions such as these by blending natural history into a modern detective story. The result was a huge success, but why? Can we learn from this genre of wildlife film making? I argue here that using a detective story such as this not only engages the audience more but also facilitates a greater understanding and retention of broad scientific issues.
The most important part of any medium, and especially documentary, I would argue, is its ability to engage an audience. Presenters interested in critical thinking have long since developed this idea to allow professors to teach students more fully. If you were a presenter and stood up in front of an audience to explain global warming, yet your talk was amazingly dry, half the people would have zoned off in the first ten minutes. One of the first ideas that critical thinkers explain to teachers is that students can only retain about 10 minutes of facts before they mentally drift off. To get the students back into the talk, teachers are trained to pose questions to engage them and make them think for themselves. This is one aspect that "Strange Days" adopts well.
Every five to ten minutes the series host, Ed Norton, intervenes with a series of questions, stating what we know, what has been shown previously, and finally what are the new questions we must ask. These questions are often rhetorically stated to the viewer as if they could help solve this detective story. For example, in the Predators episode, after a long example of Venezuala's Lake Guri, where predators have been lost thus causing problems in the surrounding web of life, Ed Norton comes in on camera and states, "It's an obvious question. If we've created problems by kicking out predators, why can't we just bring them back." He then continues with, "... deeper questions arise. Can predators survive in modern landscapes? Even if we could restore them would it make a difference?" Posing questions like this make the viewer think. It acts in many ways like the critical thinker's approach to teaching students - at intervals pause and make the viewer ask these questions to themselves. Then, when they are engaged and interested, start to feed them answers. Norton finishes his speech by explaining that "answers are coming from America's premiere wilderness." Yet this technique does more than just engage the viewers.
Mystery approaches are great because they lead viewers to make decisions for themselves. Each step of the way, the filmmaker who delves into detective stories, wants the viewer to start to ask the questions that the scientists had to ask to reach their discoveries. In Predators, they begin with each scientist explaining about what led them to ask the questions, yet they don't tell you the whole story until the first questions have been answered. It leads you through the story instead of giving you the answers upfront. This engages the audience enough that it makes them feel like they have come up with the answers themselves, simply because they have gone through the process of discovery with the scientists. Using this technique on complex issues like invasive species, loss of predators, global warming and water pollution encourage critical thinking skills that are a step above giving facts. In this way I feel that "Strange Days" pushes the boundary on a line that seems to exist between compromising entertainment for facts.
Depicted in a sort of dual right-side-up/upside-down merging triangle is the idea that documentaries can have either a lot of facts or a lot of entertainment. In many cases, I feel that this is true, yet "Strange Days" proves that you can have both. Scientists are continually spilling out facts in this series through their own detective stories. With the use of ingenious visual techniques, complex ideas are explained in only a few seconds. Finally, with the detective story itself and the engaging nature of the series, ideas are retained, a notable incongruence with fact-filled documentaries. What this all boils down to is an interesting approach to wildlife film making. With this I stop, and like critical thinkers teach us to do, ask, "What can we learn from this approach?"
The most important thing we can learn from this documentary is that engaging an audience is key to the success of the film, its ability to teach the audience, and its ability to create change. While I have thus far not mentioned how it could promote change, I feel that this is a logical conclusion from any film that teaches well, engages the audience, and clearly states that it is trying to promote change. This combined with teaching plans (pbs.org) for educators, a web presence and a traveling lecture series, (nationalgeographic.com), it's clear that the creators had this in mind.
On a final, personal note, I realize that documentaries of this style are made in such a way to appeal to a public that is used to MTV, and programs like "CSI". While not all documentaries need to take this approach, we can not fail to realize that most of the public needs this sort of documentary to learn what science is trying to tell us. Adapting our techniques for this changing culture is a must, and something that we should accept. We must find ways to use these techniques in our own way to tell engaging, entertaining, and fact-filled documentaries to create the change we are all striving for.
Strange Days on Planet Earth: Links
The official Strange Days link on PBS.org
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