La Planète blanche (2006)
Directed by Jean Lemire, Thierry Piantanida

Film Review

Looking suspiciously as if it was intended as a companion piece to Luc Jacquet's Antarctic-based documentary La Marche de l'empereur (2005), La Planète Blanche whisks us off to the other pole and offers a similarly intoxicating montage of exotic creatures fighting for survival in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is inhospitable.  Unlike Jacquet's film, however, this Antarctic odyssey (which took three years to film) presents a bewildering away of animal life, ranging from the unutterably cute to the spectacularly weird and frightening.  Partly as a result of the rich diversity of animal life on display the film lacks the cohesion of Jacquet's penguin saga and ends up resembling a succession of wildlife films randomly spliced together.  Yet because there is so much on offer, so many things to marvel at, there is little chance that the spectator will ever getting bored.  It may be a little chaotic and aimless but this is still a fascinating voyage of discovery.

If La Planète Blanche has one serious artistic flaw it is Bruno Coulais's overly intrusive musical accompaniment, which begins as an annoying distraction from the fantastic images on the screen and ends up feeling like a physical assault.  Without the option of muting the sound altogether it is unlikely that this reviewer would have got to the end of the film.  What were the directors thinking of?  Watching parts of the film a second time, with the sound turned off, it is astonishing how much more eloquent and moving it is.  What is even more perplexing is why the score is played over the voiceover narration.  The distinguished explorer Jean-Louis Etienne has such a smooth and melodious voice that it seems almost heretical to drown out his authoritative narration with Coulais's ill-placed musical abomination.

Thankfully, such is the wealth of the visual feast that directors Thierry Piantanida, Thierry Ragobert and Jean Lemire lay before our eyes that a major blunder in the sound department is at least partly forgiven.  If you are not turned on by cute pictures of baby polar bears snuggling up to their parents there are more unusual treats in store, such as a mass migration of caribou across the wild wastes of the Arctic tundra, a murderous attack by an octopus on a crab that almost deserves an X-rating and, weirdest of all, a mesmeric dance by Arctic angels, the oddest creatures you will ever see.  It is a cavalcade of natural wonders, some so jaw-droppingly bizarre that they would be beyond the imagination of the most creative of science-fiction writers.

La Planète Blanche concludes with an understated but timely eco message, alerting us to the fact that, thanks to climate change, many, if not all, of the creatures shown in the film face likely extinction in the years to come.  In contrast to much of the muddled speculation about global warming this seems to be an inescapable fact.  The white planet of which we understand so little is melting before our eyes, and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent the swathe of extinctions that will result.  It is heartbreaking to think that many of the extraordinary creatures that amuse and delight us in this film are performing their swansong.

Film Synopsis

There are few places on Earth that are more inhospitable than the Arctic ice cap.  It is incredible to think that anything could survive in such extreme conditions, and yet the region is abundant in life.  Polar bears and caribous seem to thrive in these sub-zero conditions, fiercely resisting the raging blizzards that rip across the most forbidding of landscapes.  The seas offer an even more fantastic variety of life, which includes some of the most extraordinary creatures on Earth.  As well as familiar whales there are the fabulous narwhals - the unicorns of the sea - and sea angels, marine slugs that look something from another planet.

The Arctic waters are teaming with life so bizarre, so varied and so unexpected that it would defy the imagination of the world's greatest science-fiction writers.  And yet, impossible though it may seem, this hidden realm is under threat.  Little by little, the polar ice sheet is melting as a consequence of global warming, and as it does so the rich tapestry of life that it supports is being slowly unstitched, with countless species driven towards extinction.  One day, the white planet that is now too unfamiliar to us will be gone forever, and with it all the remarkable creatures that have lived there for tens of thousands of years...