The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean.
Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed.
It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future.
Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to pretend they’re anything else, some very obviously computer generated whales feel a little jarring in a documentary from the literal David Attenborough. For the most part, though, the graphics are used well to create dramatic vistas of space or primaeval Earth, or to offer more prosaic illustrations of Attenborough’s words (collages of cave paintings or early depictions of agriculture).
It will probably not shock you to learn that you can’t tell the entire story of the planet Earth and mankind in any great detail in 50 minutes. But the Att-man knows what he’s doing by this stage in his career, and works deftly with the time he has. A visually razzle-dazzly pre-life on Earth section; a gallop through the first four billion years of the planet before establishing that the appearance of man coincided with an unprecedented stable patch in the planet’s climate; an explosion of nature footage to illustrate this; bringing himself into it as he describes the world he was born into and how it’s changed over his long, long life.
Climate change is accepted as a part of the human story rather than laboured over bombastically; which works, because the question of doing something about it is raised not as a hypothetical but an inevitability. And it ends on a hopeful note: the whales are an illustration of how humans can influence the planet for the better, populations of the aquatic giants having bounced back since humanity took concerted action to save them. A projected cityscape of a hypothetical low carbon future London is another dose of optimism.
Whether or not Attenborough feels as optimistic about the future as he professes to be here, it’s a more inspiring note to end on – particularly for young audiences – than declaring it’s too late and we’re all doomed.
The final image of the show isn’t a spectacular vista of space or nature, but a life-size Attenborough, sitting in his study: it looks like he’s in the room with us. I wouldn’t put it past him to still be presenting documentaries in 10 years’ time, but there is something haunting about the sense of his physical presence – the show feels like a time capsule already, wisdom designed to live on after he’s gone.
