Glorious new 'Earth' documentary crosses planet to capture 'Amazing Day'

You think your day was rough? At least you didn't have to outrace an army of slithering snakes. Or cross a swollen river filled with hungry predators. Or, despite being exhausted, brave huge Arctic waves to get home.

Such are the daily challenges shown with wondrous detail in the new BBC documentary "Earth: One Amazing Day," which gets close enough to some remarkable critters that you can see fur twitch.

The Earth might be the film's titular star but the documentary is really about the sun and how that star's waxing and waning energy over 24 hours shapes life down here. "We all have one thing in common: Our lives are driven by the rhythm of night and day," says narrator Robert Redford.

The film - directed by Richard Dale, Peter Webber and Fan Lixin - comes a decade after the release of "Earth," a re-cut version of the BBC series "Planet Earth" which took viewers from the North to the South poles. The filmmakers this time call it a whistle-stop exploration of the entire planet. We encourage you to hop aboard.

It starts at dawn with a deliriously cute panda cub, waking up. We then go to the African savanna to catch a serval hunting and then to the Pacific to see iguanas on rocks waiting for the sun's warmth.

Other beasts featured are narwhals swimming through ice channels in footage that took a month to film, bears rubbing up on trees to playful music, and a pair of giraffes getting into a fight with their necks. We see chinstrap penguins struggle with unforgiving cliffs and sperm whales taking a midday nap vertically. It's remarkable stuff. This film even makes watching bamboo grow via time-lapse fascinating.

The 100-strong camera crew took advantage of leaps in technology, including stronger batteries, to help capture animals. There's one astounding aerial sequence of a racket-tail hummingbird facing-off against a swarm of bees that is an absolute cinematic triumph.

There's precious little gore and the filmmakers have largely avoided having any furry hero who we've come to root for end up in something's stomach. But conflict is never very far and some sequences may rattle younger kids.

There's also no politics - no mention of global warming or species destruction. Just a gentle reminder that "the future of all life lies in our hands." (For noted environmentalist Redford, holding his tongue must have been as hard as a field mouse outrunning a hungry lion.)

What's not hard is admiring how rich and beautiful this documentary is, from the slow-mo water droplets to long tailed mayflies fluttering over a river. As Redford says, humans have searched the heavens but there's "nothing more amazing than what happens here, day after day." This film proves it.