Escape from Extinction: Rewilding
It’s rare for a documentary to expand beyond its initial entry. It’s not a inherent part of the form, which tends to be narrowly focused on specific incidents or events that can be described and analyzed in a singular session. The handful which move beyond that - The Decline of Western Civilization, the UP series, Paradise Lost - tend to have picked subjects so vast and complicated no one film can contain all of its truths and contradictions, requiring either an extended original film which must be broken up into pieces to be fully consumed or, more often, a continued return to the subject as more and more facets of it are brought to life. Such is Matthew Brady’s examination of increased animal extinction and how it might be thwarted.
Picking up the threads from his first examination of the subject, “Rewilding” is more specifically focused on new ideas in the field, specifically reintroducing animals to ecosystems similar to lost species -- keystone species -- to take the place of the old species and attempt to buttress regional biodiversity. It’s a bold and still controversial idea within ecological circles and one going through various levels of discreet experimentation around the world in attempt to prove it as a viable strategy for sustaining our modern environment.
Flitting around the world, Brady and his cameras catch these attempts in their current iterations. Keeping his talking heads to a minimum, just enough to explain the history and hoped for outcomes of the idea but not enough to transform “Rewilding” into a dry recitation of facts and figures. The natural world is Brady’s ultimate concern -- he makes no bones about where he comes down on the idea of rewilding and where he thinks you should, too -- and he makes sure to use it as his canvas as well. Otters bound through local waters, big cats roam rainforests and jungles, fish and fowl dive through the water -- everywhere Brady says ‘look what we have, look at what we could lose.’
It's an effective message made doubly so by connecting itself to an attempt at solution (or at least part of one). Too often advocacy documentary leaves itself at coverage of the events it is concerned with but only with the vaguest of hints at what can be done (if anything can) because solutions are hard and hard solutions are difficult to swallow. The downside of that kind of doom and gloom is filling its audience with feelings of helplessness and futility. Everything is terrible and nothing can be done.
Brady ably steps around that problem, focusing his viewpoint and his message as much as possible on what can be done by what has been done. Yes, sustainability is a real and growing problem and so is extinction; no it’s not clear that current ideas will solve these difficult problems but they are something and if nothing else could point us in the direction we should be going. As Brady’s camera tells us with every lush visage and flowing animal form there is life still out there and where there is life, there is hope.
6.5 out of 10
Narrated by Meryl Streep. Directed by Matthew R. Brady.