Earthling vs. Deep Blue

Earthling
Directed by Wolfgang Bayer and Tristan Bayer
USA, 2005

It seems almost criminal to write anything negative about Earthling, a nature film that gives us so much as far as astonishing sights of fauna and flora, from the tropics to the frozen extremes of the world. In brilliantly photographed compositions, a father and son filmmaking team (Wolfgang and Tristan Bayer) traverse a bat cave in Texas (piled 20 feet high with guano!) as well as the snow-covered hinterlands of Yellowstone, and Churchill, Manitoba, an icy, remote spot where polar bears roam. There are hypnotic visits to a toxic lake filled with translucent golden orbs (these turn out to be jellyfish) and to Mexico’s El Rosario preserve for Monarch butterflies, whose wings whirl like a rush of autumn leaves.

The movie begins with an entirely blue screen; that’s the first of several underwater sequences that are vastly more impressive than anything you’ll see in Miramax’s Deep Blue. The Bayers understand that being underwater—or watching footage of life in the ocean—is akin to being in a trance. They let us share that state, without imposing “drama” onto it. (Quite unlike the bombastic Deep Blue, which amounts to series of crescendos about what the big fish had for lunch on any given day.) Also, a polar cub starving in winter—that, too, the Bayers portray with simplicity, without milking our emotions.

Early on, the actors (who portray themselves) seem fairly sure of recreating their travels in front of cameras. The disturbingly handsome Tristan (in some shots he resembles what Gael Garcia Bernal might look like playing “Rambo”) listens to how the ocean sounds in stereo over headphones. We hear dolphins’ clicks, then watch them swim after a whale, and the images are rapturously beautiful. The bats, as well, with their black wings flapping in the sky, overlapping, are magnificent; the undulating mass of darkness suggests a Jackson Pollack canvas taking flight. And the movie sums up the inviting loneliness of winter landscapes in a single, wide-angle composition of a lone buffalo slowly trudging through snow.

Where Earthling goes wrong—and I still recommend the film highly—is in Tristan’s voice-over narration. He seems to be sweet, affable, someone you’d want along on a wildlife expedition. Yet he writes and speaks in platitudes: “I found my dreams had a place in reality,” or “The look on his face said it all.” I wished he would just pipe down and trust the eloquence of the photography to tell the tale.