Good concept, poorly executed.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

John Downes you're right that the series is just brilliant, though wrong about this program debunking climate change, as it didn't do this or attempt to. Search and watch 'Prof. Aubrey Manning - Part 1 - Learning to Live with our Planet' and he shows the facts about climate change.

Presented by zoologist Aubrey Manning "Earth Story" is a riveting documentary on the geological forces that have shaped & changed the surface of our planet over hundreds of millions of years. Scientists now realise that these changes have directly affected the evolution of all life, both plant & animal, on the earth. Nineteenth century scientists had worked out that the earth over geological time had gone in & out of ice ages but the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovic was the first man to calculate that the ice ages were due to the earth's precession. The earth acts like a gyroscope in that it note only spins on its axis but that its axis moves from side to side. This movement has now been calculated to occur over approximately every 26,000 years & so that when the North Pole is furthest away from the sun you will get an ice age. The German scientist Alfred Wegener studied the surface of the earth & saw that the west coast of Africa & the east coast of South America were very similar in shape & that moving them together you would get a surprisingly good fit. He wondered if they had somehow moved apart over geological time & theorised that all the earth's land masses might be in a constant state of motion. Later scientific studies proved him correct. Down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean is a rift valley running almost its entire length spewing out volcanic lava slowly pushing the two continents ever further apart. It has now been estimated that the 7000 miles distance or so between the continents has occurred over 58 million years. The age of the dinosaurs, which went extinct some 65 million years ago, had come & gone before all of this happened. This phenomenon now called "continental drift" occurs all over the world. The 19th century scientist Alfred Russell Wallace spent time in the islands of South East Asia studying the flora & fauna of these islands. He observed the curious fact that they were very different if you drew a north to south line down them at a certain point. Not only that, he also observed that very few species of birds would fly over that hypothetical line. Two of the islands in question are only 12 miles apart. He began to wonder if the two sets of Islands had evolved separately & had moved closer together over geological time. This quite brilliant notion was, again, proved to be entirely correct once the "tectonic plate theory" had been established as true. As with the Atlantic Ocean there are rifts in all the worlds oceans pushing the land masses slowly around the globe. When an ocean is pushed into another ocean or land mass one will be driven underneath the other in a process known as "subduction". The tectonic plate containing Australia & its surrounding islands have moved ever closer to the Asian tectonic plate over millions of years. That line is now named after Mr. Wallace. As I said at the outset this is a fascinating documentary & I feel it wouldn't be a bad idea to make it compulsory viewing in all schools. Before finishing this review I would like to mention that the user review score for this fascinating BBC documentary is only 6.3 points. To my mind, this is ridiculously low & would I happily score it a maximum 10!.

A bold statement must follow about the quality of 'Earth Story' and is given at the end of this review.As the handful of other reviewers have rightly alluded this is an eight-part series dealing with the entire geological history of our planet over the 4,600,000,000 years or so of its existence, combined with how natural life processes occurring over three thousand million years of bacteria (initially they were stromatolite colonies) interacting with atmospheric and geological processes such as the formation and spreading movement of the continents (known as plate tectonics), together with how numerous meteorological, natural chemical and physical processes have come to ultimately shape the world in which we recognise and live in now. This fantastic televised feat is accomplished with great clarity and alacrity by narrator Aubrey Manning, himself a biologist, in only 8 hours! At no time is the viewer patronised. Over a decade on all the science explained in the series remains current, and is all but unanimously regarded as wholly accurate by the international scientific community.To unravel a vast web of once unconnected strands of Earth's natural processes that took humans thousands of years to piece together, and do so coherently is a true masterpiece of programme making. We join Manning's quest as he himself attempts to unravel Earth's history across the eons. It's a huge journey, across the vastness of geological time, so different from the perspective of a human lifespan, and is brought home with ease. Visual aids, such as: viewing our planet's oceanic sea-floor spreading by satellites from space orbit, or, the demonstration of the compression and (future) collapse of the Himalayas by means of a simple tilted board and a viscous sticky fluid falling upon it, reveal a tremendous imagination in conveying the scientific principles involved to the viewer.The likelihood is no other programme or series made for the small screen has ever been able to explain so much, or deal with such infinite complexity, so competently and concisely. BBC, Discovery and National Geographic take note. Earth Story sets the gold standard which has yet to be equalled by you. The best material TV can offer. Earth Story did not require overbearing unnecessary intrusive music (often no more than psychotically repeated single piano notes), nor endless micro-second gimmicky flashing images viewed from irrelevant camera angles, nor an over simplistic dialogue that leaves your viewers puzzled and frustrated. Comparatively, these are the substandard methods of docu-TV making of the early 21st century. Therefore, taking every genre of TV programmes (produced in English) since the dawn of television, whether fiction or fact, EARTH STORY emphatically stands today as the BEST television programme and series ever made.

I originally watched Earth Story when it was shown for the first time on BBC2, and I'm currently watching it again on UKTV History ten years later.It is truly a brilliant series, explaining every facet of the Earth's many geological processes: such as plate tectonics, subduction, spreading, the carbon dioxide cycle and iron deposition as well as how those processes interact with the planet's meteorology and biology in a complex dance. It also reveals how the Earth is also reliant on and affected by the other elements of The Solar System.Personally, I don't see how you can get to the conclusion of the previous reviewer. Manning doesn't get involved in climate change, largely because the programme pre-dates the current debate and because the series sets out to be instructive about the natural life-cycle of the planet as opposed the effect of humans on that planet.Manning is more interested in a planet that's existed for several billion years and is - as far as we can tell at the moment - unique, certainly in this solar system. The fact that humans who currently infest the planet may well cause the whole thing to go pear-shaped is outside the scope of the programme which is great because it avoids turning the programme into a polemic.All in all, it's an instructive, well-told story that is - as previously mentioned - an example of how the BBC can make great programmes when it abides by the "mission to educate" that was the blueprint of Sir John Reith when the corporation was established.