It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The good part is simply the idea of exploring an alien planet, and the graphic result is correct. Just correct, technically; nothing great, as every occurrence of life is well isolated in its environment, so that there is always only one thing worth watching at once in any given picture.Now for the many wrongs, in no particular order: The comment is awful; almost complete garbage in terms of content. It is either pure speculation presented as fact, biologists talking as if they actually studied the fake alien species, or useless clichés of point of views such as that it would be great/awesome/a breakthrough/major to discover life elsewhere. Thanks for the insights, guys. It may be the reason why I fell asleep in the middle and had to watch the rest the next day.While a couple of comments are actually useful in their context, the narrated exploration / pseudo-scientific comment duality of the treatment deserves the movie. The visual part, good enough to keep you watching in hope that it will get better - the fiction is properly treated in crescendo, promising to be more eventful as time passes - is constantly interrupted by these boring people with their empty words. Some of them are just famous people, without the smallest spark of a reason to be there in the first place. Except to entrap some fans of theirs into watching. Beware George Lucas or Stephen Hawkins lovers: your idol will only appear for 3 seconds at the very beginning and 3 more at the very end of the thing, while the rest of us just get annoyed.Talking about annoying, here is how you recognise a USA documentary from, for example, a European one: before every commercial break - and not only are there commercial breaks, but there are an incredible amount of them - they give you a sneak preview of what's going to happen. Ouch! Makes you wonder why bother to build some suspense in the first place. Or, more relevantly, why they were not simply taken out of the DVD version.Now, the main disappointment for me is actually such a common rule that I shouldn't call it disappointing. It is the simple fact that every single time I see or hear something about exotic life, well, it's not exotic at all. It ends up being unimaginative parallels of Earth's most visible lifeforms. In that regard, Alien Planet falls particularly low. It starts with trees - complete with trunks, branches, leaves and sap - going to mushrooms, pack animals, running predators, all tagged with comments on their very terrestrial behaviours, be it deer duels, wolf pack hunting tactics, and so on. What a bore! I don't want to write pages on the subject but, for example, it's land exploration only, yet no thoughts are put into geology, very little into the weather, almost none into the notion of ecosystem... The objective is not to make us think about life, what it means, what it could be, how really alien it could be; it's all about trying to impress us with big critters 3D models on dull backgrounds.It doesn't matter from which angle, either science or fantasy, such a world could be built. Imagination was not much put to use here. The only part which begins to be interesting, as in alien, is the amoebic sea. Put more stuff like this, alter your building blocks, populate your world with small and interacting creatures, natural hazards, exotic landscapes, remove all the talking people, then we'll talk again. In the meantime, when I want to be mesmerized by a strange and fascinating e.t. world, I'll go back to watching Dark Crystal.

Some spoilers in the following text.For years I have been trying to get people to read Wayne Barlowe's EXPEDITION as an imaginative and entertaining view of what an alien world's ecosystem might be like. In the book there were actual human explorers. I thought that the use of robots was both more interesting and more realistic. The commentary from scientists, artists and film makes was interesting, but lacked depth. I don't think George Lucas, talented as he may be, is an expert on anything involving the hard sciences. The program needed to be at least twice as long as it was. There was a wealth of material in Barlowe's book that wasn't even touched in the show. The amazing Butcher Tree was shown briefly but not discussed at all. The icecrawlers and rimrunners were among my favorite of Barlowe's creations, but they went unmentioned in the show. The Floaters were not shown or discussed at all thus making the Eosapiens seem less obviously related to other life forms on the planet. The brevity of the presentation left the creators less able to paint a picture of a vast and complex biosphere. Perhaps this material might have been better presented in a mini series as was The Future Is Wild.By all means get the DVD of this program, but also get the book. Check it out at: http://heh.pl/&1yk

The CG work for the show was nice, and the engineering of the mission seemed plausible.Upon arrival at Darwin IV, however, everything started to go wrong. Wayne Barlowe is a talented illustrator, but he is not a scientist. He understands joints, skin, muscle, tendons, and the other things that make up an animal, but he doesn't appear to understand how animals come to be or the limitations imposed on them.A simple example is the amoebic sea, which is composed of single-celled animals far too large for reasonable nutrition/waste transport across the boundary membrane. Another example is that one of the simplest sensory adaptations - eyes, or even eyespots - does not show up on any of the animals. There is nothing so special about the ability to sense light that it should evolve on at least 8 independent occasions on Sol III, yet not at all on Darwin IV.The requirements of food chains are also completely ignored. Big animals need to eat something, either plants or smaller animals, and the amount of vegetation in evidence would not support enough prey animals to feed the number of large predators shown.The program is a showcase for Barlowe's ideas of some "cool" aliens, rather than an example of what trained scientists might come up with when they let their imaginations loose and speculate what might be.The process followed seems to be Barlowe sitting down and drawing an interesting looking critter, then trying to rationalize its existence, rather than looking at the environment and speculating how an animal might meet the challenges posed by that environment.I was struck by the fact that all of the scientists interviewed made a point of mentioning how "unexpected" and "odd" the animals seemed. Those scientists didn't seem fascinated by the ideas, they sounded to me like they were trying to distance themselves from appearing to have had anything to do with the creature design, because it would be a professional embarrassment.A program that could have been speculative science fiction was instead science fantasy.I give the program a few points for being pretty, but none for content.

An intriguing and engaging exploration of an alien world. The CGI was excellent all around with some breathtaking views of the flora and fauna of Darwin IV, a world about 6 light years from earth. It really was fun to watch. The achilles heal alluded to in the summary is the overly optimistic view of our ability to build the software necessary to carry out this venture. I'm a programmer with 12 years experience and I can tell you in no uncertain terms we are not even close to being able to program an AI like Leo. Every "breakthrough" in software development productivity since the move from assembly to C in the early 1970s has been a big gimmick. We need at least one and probably two massive breakthroughs on the same order to pull it off and I gotta tell you, I haven't seen any sign of it even on the distant horizon. Maybe someday this trip will be feasible, but not until software construction is as second nature as bridge building.Still, all in all, definitely worth watching.