Wildlife Movie Review

Everyone, especially young people who need this land to grow on for many years to come, has to get their hands on this and take what it’s saying seriously.

Among other things, the documentary is about Doug Tompkins Conservation’s partnership with Chile and Argentina and how they created or expanded seventeen national parks.

Together, they protected 14.7 million acres of land, and the numbers continue to grow. This is also a must-see for those who were involved in creating it and for the generous and enthusiastic people it’s about.

Doug Tompkins was a very passionate conservationist. He died in an accident in Patagonia, Chile, in 2015. He and his second wife Kris, who is the main character of this documentary, if we’re to be honest, continued his work.

The film’s beginning opens with a letter she’s writing to him that she’s lonely for him and asks him to come home to his wife.

This is directed by husband-and-wife team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who collaborated on “Meru,” “The Rescue,” and “Free Solo” together, some of the best documentaries available right now. “Free Solo” went on to win Best Documentary.

With this film, they are documenting the life of Doug and Kris, some of the best people ever to step foot on the planet. They planned to stop deforestation, not afraid to tell us that humans, as a species, are on the losing side if work isn’t done.

It’s mentioned that the wilderness will be gone in fifty years if we don’t stop deforestation.

After hearing some of these numbers, you’ll be asking yourself, how much time do we have after that?

She, Doug and their friends are all the most spirited environmental activists possibly of all time. In this film, you see their grasp on what our planet is going through, the number of people who are unaware and those who know but don’t care.

American rock climber, environmentalist, philanthropist and businessman, Yvon Chouinard, founded the outdoor clothing company Patagonia for his friends and for what their goals ultimately were. However, what they wanted to try and do, they needed money, so it was a big help to have imported clothing and climbing equipment. He went to South America to climb with his friend, Doug Tompkins, who happened to be the founder of his peer outdoors clothing company North Face.

All of this slowly unravels for the viewer through detailed footage and interviews. At this point, you notice Kris is the leading voice, and it’s through her eyes and declarations that we’re learning of these fantastic people, including herself, and what they did. Without Doug, she was having trouble moving on. Their master plan was to take the money they had accumulated and purchase land from people experiencing poverty, keeping the land untouched.

Buy land and make them untouchable national parks.

Chile needed to stop cutting down its forest. However, former Chile senator Claudio Alvarado saw it as nothing more than business people masquerading as ecologists. More and more is revealed about how this just wasn’t the case. Landscape without wildlife is just scenery and the wildlife was missing. What needed to be done was to bring certain species back, introduce them to the wild, and stop allowing poachers and hunters to kill the livestock. The ecosystem needed to be recreated; repopulated. If we’re to sustain this planet, it’s quite honestly the most important thing we could do.

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin tell us how Doug said he wanted to protect biodiversity, just as a principle, if nothing else. But if we were to live free on this planet and wanted evolution to continue to unfold, we had a lot to do. He said we’re squeezing out the creatures from their habitat and over-expanding. If this continues, it doesn’t matter what we want; collapse is inevitable.

This documentary is spectacular. It’s a little frightening at times, but it’s better to know what’s coming and try to stop it than shove our heads in the sands, pretending everything is just peachy.

#WildLifeFilm is available to stream on National Geographic Channel.