Hokay, So Here's Teh Earth

How the Earth Was Made (2007)

Rating ... B+ (78)

TV movies be damned, not entirely because they're - well - TV movies but also because it seems that 75% of them are about avian influenza and top-this natural disasters. (Category ... 6!) So what should follow here is a discourse on How the Earth Was Made bucks the trend, but in all honesty director Peter Chinn's expansive depiction of Earth's 4.6 billion year lifetime is really just one massive disaster after another - meteor impacts followed by glacial advance followed by volcanoes. So what's the difference? In the equation of eruptions caused by subducting oceanic plates plus pointless hysteria, Chinn wisely removes the latter variable.

For everyone who had their fill of disaster flicks in the 90's, don't bail just yet. There's also a great deal of collegiate geology present. Dinosaurs. Diamonds and coal. Fossils. Climatology. Plate tectonics. The origin of water. Stromatolites, supercontinents, and Earth as a giant snowball? In what's habitually the safest multiple choice response, how about all of the above?

But wait... there's more! You're probably wondering why the largely factual How the Earth Was Made deserves to be a film rather than stay in the domain of illustrated textbooks. Aside from the talking heads there's hardly a human to be found in the remaining footage, and it's not merely coincidence this absence fits snugly with Chinn's implicit perspective on the relative brevity of human progress. In one telling scene, weeds in the foreground are used to obstruct the view of the camera until they are pushed aside to reveal the Manhattan skyline lingering indistinctly behind them. Chinn understands that from his film's vantage point, man's accomplishments are more the novelty, a product of time and chance fortunate enough to develop in spite of its homeland's volatile nature. When the film's visual timeline reaches present day, the expected ho-hum lecture on man's reign over the Earth is terse and modest, before Chinn simply hurtles onward to the Earth's future of continued ice ages, continental drift, and eventual demise.

But Chinn's vision isn't all doom and gloom. His talking heads pay homage to their predecessors, and in some respects How the Earth Was Made functions as a paean to the unheralded scientists who in their pursuit of truth were rewarded with public indifference, contempt, and even expiration. Their intellectual discoveries enabled descendants to probe further into the Earth's secrets, and the film juxtaposes this exponential growth of knowledge between human generations against the facts about Earth that geologists and climatologists were actually learning: that our planet is regulated, balanced, and subject to limitation. Ice ages alternate with interglaciation, elements are maintained in atmospheric and biological cycles, and mountains are bolstered by uplift to the extent they're stymied by erosion. These principles are contrasted with Chinn's closing commentary about mankind's ability to emerge from insignificance. However titanic its duration, Earth is an entity with a lifespan, and as humans ultimately diverge from its fate they achieve what other species have failed to accomplish: to transcend their ancestors. The irony of this optimism is that possibly the year's most humanistic subtext occurs in a film where the fewest of them are actually featured. Who could have seen that coming?