For the past few weeks, I’ve been enjoying the Sigourney Weaver-narrated documentary series Planet Earth, which features a variety of rarely or never before seen species and perspectives (and never hesitates to congratulate itself thusly in the voiceover). Even in ole’ regular D – as opposed to HD – it’s breathtaking stuff most of the time, and I would think it darn nigh impossible to watch stories like the desperate polar bears whose lives are getting destroyed due to global warming and not feel compelled to take some sort of action or at least demand that your elected representatives do so.
What I didn’t think once during the entire series was “Man, they really need to do this again, but in cinemas.” While documentary films have touched upon this subject matter before, trying to convey Earth’s natural beauty on a planetwide scope is a much better fit for the length and pacing of a multi-part television series than something you want people to sit in a theater two hours or more for. Nonetheless, Luc Besson is taking the Green challenge with his next project, Boomerang.
The film is a collaboration with environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand that is due to be shot in 60 countries aiming to capture natural beauty in as many environments as possible. And like Planet Earth, there is an underlying message of the world environment changing for the worst and us needing to cut that shit out. What’s different is that the plan is to only charge for the film as much as is needed to payback investors plus a promised 10 percent profit, after which the film will made available for the low, low file-sharing price of free. That’s fine and well, but without a more prominent distribution strategy, I feel like a lot of this effort is going to be in vain. Hopefully, more details about such a strategy will be forthcoming soon. Otherwise, I see this going the way of our icecaps…