This documentary suffers from the ever-familiar problem of not being narrated by David Attenborough. It features a lot of really incredible shots of the Patagonian landscape and the intimate lives of these animals--on par with just about any other series--but the script is lacking.
Before I go off on my frustrations about the industry, I want to say first that this really is worth watching for the visuals. I've never seen such an in-depth look at mountain lions (or cougars or pumas or catamounts or whatever you want to call them, in central Canada I grew up calling them mountain lions), and struck by the beauty of Patagonia, I found myself wondering why it hasn't been featured as heavily in those big-budget Attenborough films. All those drone shots panning across the jagged Andes made me really wish I could visit them, and the sequences where these big cats were hunting guanacos were pretty incredible.
This film is part of a real renaissance in natural history documentaries over the past 10 years or so, where we've seen techniques pioneered in the first Planet Earth series as well as new technology like drones and improvements in digital cameras making really world-class cinematography more accessible to productions without an Attenborough-scale budget. The issue is that there hasn't been commensurate improvement in script writing so we end up with these oddly mismatched shows. Particularly among American productions that suffer from the sensationalized ecosystem of the modern TV documentary, you end up with scripts that are full of forced, mediocre imagery, are thin on actual scientific insight, and they're delivered by Hollywood actors who don't know what they're talking about and can't help but turn their narration into a performance.
To an extent, this is preference. I've definitely been told I like boring movies, but this is usually coming from people who don't usually watch nature documentaries anyway, so I feel my grievances aren't entirely unfounded. The trouble to me seems to be that producers think a documentary will fail without gravitas in the narration, and they think an actor will be able to emulate that better than taking a chance on an expert or at least some sort of a naturalist. The result is this lack of credibility, and as the script is delivered by somebody who'd rather watch Shakespeare than Attenborough, these actors probably don't even recognize that they're missing the mark. I've seen a few documentaries that were narrated by the wildlife photographers, or narrated by there credible naturalists like David Suzuki in Canada, and for me, the end product is far superior to anything Hollywood can put together.
Before I go off on my frustrations about the industry, I want to say first that this really is worth watching for the visuals. I've never seen such an in-depth look at mountain lions (or cougars or pumas or catamounts or whatever you want to call them, in central Canada I grew up calling them mountain lions), and struck by the beauty of Patagonia, I found myself wondering why it hasn't been featured as heavily in those big-budget Attenborough films. All those drone shots panning across the jagged Andes made me really wish I could visit them, and the sequences where these big cats were hunting guanacos were pretty incredible.
This film is part of a real renaissance in natural history documentaries over the past 10 years or so, where we've seen techniques pioneered in the first Planet Earth series as well as new technology like drones and improvements in digital cameras making really world-class cinematography more accessible to productions without an Attenborough-scale budget. The issue is that there hasn't been commensurate improvement in script writing so we end up with these oddly mismatched shows. Particularly among American productions that suffer from the sensationalized ecosystem of the modern TV documentary, you end up with scripts that are full of forced, mediocre imagery, are thin on actual scientific insight, and they're delivered by Hollywood actors who don't know what they're talking about and can't help but turn their narration into a performance.
To an extent, this is preference. I've definitely been told I like boring movies, but this is usually coming from people who don't usually watch nature documentaries anyway, so I feel my grievances aren't entirely unfounded. The trouble to me seems to be that producers think a documentary will fail without gravitas in the narration, and they think an actor will be able to emulate that better than taking a chance on an expert or at least some sort of a naturalist. The result is this lack of credibility, and as the script is delivered by somebody who'd rather watch Shakespeare than Attenborough, these actors probably don't even recognize that they're missing the mark. I've seen a few documentaries that were narrated by the wildlife photographers, or narrated by there credible naturalists like David Suzuki in Canada, and for me, the end product is far superior to anything Hollywood can put together.
