Tears to Your Eyes

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Earth - Movie PosterEARTH is a beautiful film that covers the globe from the Arctic to Antarctica and focuses on a family of polar bears, elephants, and humpback whales in the process.

To do so, dozens of film crews used 200 locations in 64 countries, and the result is magnificent.

The film begins in January in the high Arctic where there has been no sun for months.

The narrator, James Earl Jones, says, “Every living thing is waiting.”

Then we see a mother polar bear and her two cubs come our of their den. The mother hasn’t eaten in five months and has lost half her body weight, we are told.

In the meantime, we also see the father polar bear in his solitary search for food, which becomes increasingly difficult because of the melting polar ice.

We see herds of caribou in migration across the tundra and the wolves who shadow them.

At this point, you might ask, “How did they manage to film this?” Stick around for the closing credits, and you will see how those shots were made and some of the dangers that the film crews encountered.

We see baby ducklings and their first flying experience out of the tree, or more accurately, as the narrator says, “falling with style.”

Then we are in the Tropics, where the sun shines 12 hours a day every day, and we see the Birds of Paradise in New Guinea. You can try to ignore the cheap jokes and comments from the narrator, but it is also hard to forget that he was also the voice of Darth Vader, remember?

We travel to the dry season in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa and pick up a mother elephant and her calf struggling to keep up with the herd on their search for water.

We watch the drama unfold between the hunter and the hunted in extreme slow motion.

The pictures of scenery are majestic and make you appreciate what a wonderful planet we live on, as well as how fragile and dangerous life on it is for us all.

The final family we track is a mother humpback whale and her calf, who have to travel 4,000 miles from their breeding ground to Antarctica in search of food.

EARTH is so moving that it brings tears to your eyes.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”