WaterLife (2009)

Directed by: Juan Antonio Rodriguez Llano, Ramon Campoamor | 700 minutes | documentary

Good example is good to follow. After the enormous – and justified – success of the BBC production “Planet Earth”, several production companies have been inspired to capture the splendor of mother earth in a similar way. The Spanish filmmakers of ‘Water Life’ chose water, in all its beautiful and sometimes extreme forms, as the theme. Anyone who expects only to be presented with a refined aquarium is wrong; after all, water is the source of all life on this planet, so in addition to fish, waterfowl and other animals that live near seas, lakes and rivers, we also see dromedaries in the desert and sloths in the jungle.

The shots are absolutely stunning: the animals are often filmed in close up, frequently even extreme close ups, so that every detail is beautifully captured. The nature documentary also provides beautiful overview shots of areas where water plays a clear, but sometimes less obvious role. Finally, we also regularly see highly magnified images of micro-organisms in their translucent forms; it is all swarming together and because you cannot see these animals with the naked eye, you can hardly imagine them. This makes the regular insertion of these images somewhat redundant.

The voice over is monotonous and often not interesting enough to hold the viewer’s attention. The same goes for the music. It is predictable which tune will be heard when. Think, for example, of an exciting melody in a shot of a hunting animal and its prey.

‘Water Life’ consists of 26 episodes, each of approximately 25 minutes. That is a long time, especially if you consider that the documentary, apart from the sometimes spectacular images, is sometimes repeated. Although a different starting point is taken for each episode: dark water, usable water, protective water, borrowed water, salt forests, to name just a few examples, but halfway through the episode people often fall back on images that were also in another episode. had fitted well. While this may seem inevitable, it doesn’t make the structure any clearer. Sometimes the makers have tried to add some humor to the images through editing, which is very striking in the episode about the mangroves: the crabs that, when the water leaves their habitat, have to ensure that they get their food very quickly; a funny sight due to the accelerated shots, especially with the images of the crab beckoning with his scissors (as if he wants to tell his species to hurry). Or the funny Saharan resident, who mischievous looks into the camera and licks his eye with his tongue, for example: unique footage, of which the makers already realized this themselves, as evidenced by the fact that they have included this piece in the leader of the series.

In the end ‘Water Life’ is, at least for the images, definitely worth watching, although it is in any case advisable to spread this over several stages.