Force of Nature review – this nature show turns the climate crisis into a pompom-shaking spectacle

Like a pair of sulky teens … sibling cheetahs in the flood-struck Maasai Mara national reserve in ITV1’s Force of Nature. Photograph: Plimsoll Productions/ITVView image in fullscreenLike a pair of sulky teens …

sibling cheetahs in the flood-struck Maasai Mara national reserve in ITV1’s Force of Nature. Photograph: Plimsoll Productions/ITVReviewForce of Nature review – this nature show turns the climate crisis into a pompom-shaking spectacleCheetahs forced to cross roiling rivers, owls battered by storms … the tone of this look at how extreme weather affects animals is all a bit disaster movie.

Subtle, it is notYou have a thick neck and poorly defined calf muscles and you live in South Dakota with your feckless partner and your five expressionless children. You are an owl. Your days consist of lengthy stretches of nothing, punctuated by sudden bursts of unimaginable terror.

Coyotes, badgers and snakes are all bent on reducing your beak to marmalade.But it’s the weather that poses the biggest threat. Specifically, shouts Force of Nature, it’s the “MONSTER STORMS” that rumble ominously across the prairies, each of which forces you and your family to scurry into your burrow, whereupon you will stand with your trembling backs to the wall, legs wide apart and fluffy britches a-flap, like anxious viscounts in the court of Charles II.

Will you survive? Or will you be eviscerated by the “cluster bombs of tornadoes” that churn with increasing frequency through the midwest?Three years in the making, this six-part documentary focuses on the impact of such “extreme weather events” on the planet’s animals.

The gist? They’re stuffed. Or are at the very least in terrible trouble.

What to do?“When nature turns against them,” declaims narrator Andrew Lincoln, “they’re not just enduring … they are fighting back.

These animals are,” he adds, Zeus-like in what one imagines are a particularly large pair of chinos, “… a FORCE OF NATURE!” Cue a dramatic montage of climate-battered creatures, each of which has presumably been captured in the moments before it rolled up its sleeves and invited the weather to step outside “for a word”.

View image in fullscreenThreatened by climate change … a family of owls pictured in South Dakota. Photograph: Plimsoll Productions/ITVThere are elephants up to their trunks in churning storm water.

There is a lizard clinging to a plant stalk as it’s blown sideways by a gale. There is, inevitably, a polar bear – long established as the poster-beast for the climate crisis – floating mournfully into the distance on a small disc of ice. These scenes are accompanied by disembodied snippets from global news reports – each a ghostly transmission from Doom FM.

“West Africa’s worst heatwave in living memory,” rumbles one. “Arctic is warming at around three times faster than the rest of the globe,” booms another.It’s all a bit late-90s Hollywood disaster movie, a bit Earth Song; the thunderous soundtrack and shots of crashing waves and sorrowing elephants adds up to a vision of catastrophe that offers little room for subtlety.

Instead, we get a closeup of chimps holding hands and Lincoln doing this … and this … and sometimes …

THIS to the final three words of every sentence, a maddening quirk that makes it doubly difficult to take lines such as “When water is hard to come by, peace … turns to violence” seriously.Still, the photography is tremendous, so let’s do our best to focus on that.

Emergencies on planet Earth: images from the climate crisis – in picturesRead moreOff we go, then, to Kenya, where cameras capture the dreadful majesty of the skies as they wreak record-breaking havoc on a pair of cheetah siblings in the flood-struck Maasai Mara national reserve. It’s quite something. There are clouds that look like fists and the sort of clouds that cock their leg over cricket grounds and run away laughing as spectators scramble for their building-society umbrellas.

Cheetahs, alas, don’t have umbrellas. Plus, they are terrible at cricket. And so they just stand there looking drenched and miserable, like sulky teens at a bus stop.

But the flood waters continue to rise, and so the brothers are forced to cross a roiling river to reach lunch (antelopes). It’s a poignant sight, the swimming-averse cats bobbing and lurching through the water like chickens through wallpaper paste.“The bigger the storm, the greater the heroes,” weeps Lincoln as the cheetahs eventually reach the other side.

Heroes? “Fighting back”? Or just everyday victims of a human-made disaster, forced to struggle for survival as the world hems, haws and makes documentaries that, however well-meaning, turn it all into a pompom-shaking spectacle?

Back in South Dakota, the owls emerge from their storm-burrow, wobbly but alive. Phew. Whether they can endure another five episodes of Lincoln’s italics, however, remains …

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