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Alien Worlds Movie Review

Alien Worlds is a 2020 British sci-fi nature docufiction that was released on Netflix. It’s a pretty interesting, but flawed experiment.

This is a 4-episode miniseries that focuses on possible extraterrestrial life as it is conceptualized in imagined exoplanets. The series in each episode jumps back and forth from these imaginary scenarios to their real-life counterparts on our Earth. It’s an intriguing idea, but the execution is messy without a doubt.

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It is a big problem when you have a series that features a big budget and strong VFX work, but the end result is a documentary that is much more interesting in the Earth parts than the exoplanet ones. The flaw in these imaginary scenarios is that they repeated the same sequences way too often and that the narration was just as confident during these segments, leading to a fascinating and visually arresting, but polarizing and confusing mess.

The Earth segments fare infinitely better. This is the heart of this series as this is where it truly shines. Again, most of these I had already known, but some creatures that are explored were new even to me as a big biology enthusiast, and simply the ecological themes were the highlights as it explores how interconnected the Earth’s ecosystems are and in the third episode just how hugely important fungi are to this whole process.

The science is terrific in these segments and very important while the narration is strong and the portrayed scientists are mostly quite interesting. The photography is also great as are some of the points being made about the role of humans in the animals’ lives.

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