Alien Planet: A Retrospective Review

Alien Planet (2005) TV Movie Review

 

Twenty years ago, a two-hour movie premiered on Discovery Channel that did something I had never seen before: it documented a fictional planet and its native inhabitants as if it were real. I saw this before I had discovered the found footage and mockumentary genres, but Alien Planet is classified as “docufiction” because it uses real science and perspectives from valued scientists in different fields to justify and support what is being seen on screen, even though the planet and creatures in question are entirely made up. Though it’s feature length, running 94 minutes without commercials, it’s also classified as a TV special, but it was one I enjoyed so much as a kid that I bought the DVD and watched it over and over again—in fact, it was one of the first DVDs I owned!

In a nutshell, the first mission to a planet called Darwin IV from beginning to end is what’s documented, with the main characters serving as a couple of robotic probes, since this is an unmanned mission. The first of three probes explodes upon entry to the atmosphere due to a malfunction, which is a nice detail to make it seem less like a sci-fi movie a la Forbidden Planet or Avatar or Prometheus and more like a real event. Two other probes are then sent down, one of which is blue, named Leo (as in Leonardo Davinci) and the other is orange, named Ike (as in Isaac Newton). Right away, Leo and Ike are stalked by a mysterious unseen creature (we frequently see from its otherworldly POV) and this sustains an impressive level of mystery, intrigue, and suspense for the majority of the runtime, in addition to the fascinating “probing” of this new world. I won’t spoil too much for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the teasing of the unseen creature pays off in the end.

The probes are given a bit of personality through their differing appearances, as well as with their AI, but the human quality is spliced in with cutaways to real interviews amid the probes discovering new species and unusual features of the planet. Some of the interview clips are experts speaking generally about intergalactic space travel in a realistic way, and other clips are experts speaking about the fictional creatures as if they were real and they had reviewed the footage we just saw. It’s a clever attempt to add a level of authenticity, and while it sometimes doesn’t quite work to the desired effect, the alternating Darwin IV mission footage and interviews are well balanced. It’s sometimes annoying watching the non-broadcast version when brief moments are teased twice during points when there would have been commercial breaks, but it isn’t too distracting or repetitive, as these effects-heavy docudramas can be. Overall, the pacing is great—or, to use an astronomy term, it’s in the “Goldilocks Zone”—and the narration by John C. McGinley helps take viewers along for the ride without sounding overdramatic.

Alien Planet was based on the book Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV by author Wayne Barlowe, and while there were some notable changes in the transition from page to screen (ex: changing the mission to being unmanned in order to make it more realistic/believable), from what I understand, the ecology of the planet is largely faithful to what Barlowe imagined. I haven’t read the book, but it seems his strange designs for life on Darwin IV remained mostly the same, as he was a visual consultant for the adaptation, and his book contains many images which he drew to accompany the written work. It’s nice to see they actually stuck to his source material instead of just using the basic idea and butchering it, and the changes that were made served the story and the approach to telling it.

Obviously one of the biggest appeals of the show is seeing all the interesting designs for the creatures, and every single one is creative, with thought put into how they fit into their environment and survive. I won’t recount every organism, but a few standouts for me are the noisy, bioluminescent Bladderhorns, the giant jet-like Skewers, and the Godzilla-sized Sea Striders. Though it seems the probes stumble across new animals very quickly, onscreen stats actually show the days of their mission (it ends 160 days in), but we are just seeing the dramatized version with all the good stuff. It uses some documentary tactics, like cameras from “mini-probes” deployed by Ike and Leo, but a lot of the creature scenes are dramatized and shot from a third-person perspective, which I actually appreciate. Had this all been shown in a found-footage manner, it probably would’ve gotten repetitive and been frustrating when it was hard to see the aliens.

Some of the criticism of Alien Planet I’ve seen has been levelled at the strangeness of the designs for the aliens, but I think a lot of that criticism is tenuous. Multiple experts say in their interviews that we would have no idea what life on other planets would look like, and I appreciate that the nature of Darwin IV’s conditions dictates how many of the animals look and behave. Yeah, some of them are a bit odd, but at least they are all original designs and look like they all belong on the same planet. The strangeness of some of them is also part of what made me want to watch Alien Planet again and again as a kid, and what has brought me back to it even all these years later. It took until just my most recent viewing for me to notice the Grove-Back, one of the largest creatures, with elephant-like feet, only has two legs! All this time I thought it was a four-legged animal, but its mindboggling size and design tricked my eyes (especially back when I used to watch it on the tiny 8-inch screen of my portable DVD player). 

Most of the technical methods of bringing Darwin IV to life are above average for TV at the time. The music isn’t particularly incredible, but it has some effective techno vibes and suits the action well. The sound effects, by contrast, are extremely efficacious, and unlike many Discovery shows of this nature, it doesn’t just recycle familiar sound bites or stock creature noises. All the aliens utter unique, otherworldly sounds, many of which add a foreboding quality to their presence, helping them come to life. The probe sound effects, too, are memorable. The clunk of their thrusters rotating really stuck with me, for whatever reason. As for the visual effects, yeah, they are certainly dated by today’s standards, but many of the visuals hold up reasonably well. Some of the environments are real backdrops, and the textures on the probes are pretty convincing. Some of the creatures look a bit plastic and stiff, but even when the camera gets up close, plenty of details remain. Darwin IV is a colourful and bizarre world that’s both startling and fascinating.

There are definitely some quirky aspects to Alien Planet, beyond just the creature designs. For whatever reason, there are multiple parallels drawn and comparisons made to the dinosaurs, from the Arrowtounge being described as the size of a T-rex, to the K-T extinction event being referenced, for…some reason? My theory is they had access to the Discovery Channel library of CGI dinosaur footage from some of the recently released (at the time) shows, and the visuals matched up well with the visuals of the Darwin IV aliens, so they fenagled the narration and interviews to accommodate that footage whenever possible. I suppose many of the creatures possess some dinosaur-like features, although one strange aspect to all the lifeforms is they seem to lack eyes. Given Barlowe is so well versed in sci-fi, maybe it was his way of referencing H.R. Giger’s design for Alien.

Sometimes the narration comes off as unintentionally funny when some ridiculous stuff is said with such sincerity. “On earth, we call them wolves. On Darwin IV, they’re called Prongheads.”  Thankfully, none of the experts who are interviewed are too annoying or questionable; given the premise, having George Lucas speak about alien life doesn’t really undermine the credibility, although I found it a bit odd that the guy who came up with the whole idea, author Wayne Barlowe, only appears briefly one time early on and then once more at the end, but that’s it. Perhaps it was an attempt to make it seem more realistic? What could take some viewers out of the experience is the way some of the experts repeatedly comment on how “strange” the aliens are, as if they don’t truly believe they could exist. My take on it? No, these creatures probably wouldn’t all exist exactly like that on a real alien planet, but if you can suspend your disbelief (a requirement, this is certainly not a documentary by any means) you should be able to just enjoy the expedition.

Even though it’s now 20 years old, and obviously a bit dated in terms of the effects, I think it still holds up pretty well, and is worth checking out whether you haven’t seen it since it was first on TV or if you have never seen it before but are interested in sci-fi. It came out not long after another similar docudrama, Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real (2004), which speculated how dragons may have evolved and lived on Earth, but that one I haven’t been as compelled to watch again. I find it’s more similar to the 2002 miniseries The Future is Wild—only in terms of some of the weird creatures, though. That show I found to be lackluster even back in the 2000s. It is drawn out, tedious, goofy, supported by interviews with uninteresting experts, full of dated effects, and not very believable: everything Alien Planet is not.

I haven’t seen a good docufiction film or TV special like this one in a long time, but Alien Planet is the best one from this 2000s era of science-adjacent specials, and probably the most scientifically-sound one of them all, simply because it could happen one day. I would love to see an update on this special, or a new take on the same premise but with new creatures on a different world. I would even just like to see a new docufiction show or movie that portrays something completely made up in as realistic a manner as possible, because looking back on Alien Planet, it’s a fun way to blend fact and fiction, when done right.