I was hardly surprised to find that I was the only person in the audience for this marvelous film; the three below took up the bulk. That's the way it is here. Our only hope, with one management for all 9 screens, is that one screen will be used for "art" films; it will take time to garner an audience for them, but with two universities and a few of us culture vulturesŠ

Even if you've watched the TV BBC planet earth series, you'd have a joyous surprise in seeing it, with some new scenes on the big screen. The color, sound, sharpness of detail - all worth the massive efforts that went into the remaking of it (you see hints of that during the final credits) and well worth seeing again in this compressed form.

With background narration by James Earl Jones and a rich musical score by, I think, George Fenton, Alastair Fothergill & Mark Linfield created a truly worthy documentary. The quick rush from scene to scene lacks the depth of exposure as in, say, "March of the Penguins," nor does it have the brilliantly eloquent format found in "Baraka"; instead, it takes the via media - quite intentionally, I believe - to make a movie that reaches the largest audience possible. The youngest kids, with a reach, will stay with it, thanks to its almost MTV editing and the inclusion of amusing shots of newborns finding their way in a new world; while adults needn't do more than bask in the vastness of variety in a world of flora & fauna struggling to maintain its existence against threatening global changes.

Nothing really new here for nature enthusiasts; much of this could be found, here & there, in the plethora of nature documentaries - especially those now being touted in HDTV.

But the visuals! Leaping from January in the arctic with a mother polar bear attempting to teach two cubs how to cope with living in a shrinking world (and father finding it tragically still more difficult), we leap from season to season, from country to country, to appreciate the common denominator among the critters, with each species following the same family process. The fauna world, we discover, exists to be born, taught to adjust to each environment, to survive in the timeless ritual of hunter & hunted - from the polar bears to elephants, to lions, to monkeys, to wolves, to insects and more.

Martin Elsbury had a prodigious task in editing the 12-hours of the BBC version down to this accessible 95-minutes. Some sacrifices in leaps & jumps were the price, but the results are well worth seeing.