The Perth show with Eric Bana as host.
Camera IconThe Perth show with Eric Bana as host. Credit: Supplied/Supplied

Review: David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II Live a journey of the senses

Gabrielle JefferyWeekend Kwinana Courier

DAVID Attenborough’s Planet Earth II is a visual masterpiece encapsulating all the thrills and spills of the natural world and its creatures.

Add to the mix a live orchestra and the stage is set for a memorising experience that indulges your senses of sight, sound and feeling.

Hosted by Eric Bana at Perth Arena, Planet Earth II Live in Concert featured the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO) with conductor Vanessa Scammell for the Perth leg of the Australian tour.

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Act 1 opens with visuals of a male sloth in his quest for love and courting of a female.

Portrayed with humour, the male sloth swims through the ocean on his epic journey to find his mate.

The musical score is intense and draws you in culminating to a climax – literally – as he reaches his mate before they embrace to the sound of an orchestral crescendo.

As the music softens footage veers away from their embrace to a rather relaxed looking sloth seated by himself in a tree with a definitive look of complete satisfaction.

The auditory element of the show delights as it immerses the audience in the scenes playing out on the big screen behind the orchestra.

The show opens with a male sloth swimming to his love interest.
Camera IconThe show opens with a male sloth swimming to his love interest. Credit: Supplied/Supplied

You feel it in your core as your heart races; the sound vibrates and pulls at your chest as you feel part of the film as if you were there experiencing what the animals are feeling as they are hunted or hunter.

Lighting is also used throughout the show with bright flashes of different colours at certain points aimed to add to the intensity the audience feels.

Some of the lighting was distracting, particularly the big flashes from floodlights that actually took away from the experience and leaving a feeling of annoyance.

With stunning visuals throughout all animals are portrayed exquisitely down to the finest detail such as life of a field mouse.

Searching for berries and grass seeds the mouse becomes a pendulum as a stalk of grass bends and sways in the breeze under its weight.

Suddenly the talons of a hungry owl come into to view and down towards the timid creature; it falls to the ground and runs then the screen goes black.

The audience breathes a collective sigh of relief as the screen lights up with a scene of the mouse in her burrow nuzzled with her babies.

On the whole it was a perfect collaboration of sight and sound that truly heightened the experience for the audience and worth seeing.

WASO played to the score by the Academy Award-winner Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and Jasha Klebe.

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