YMMV / Life on Our Planet

• Fandom Rivalry: A one sided example, but given it was released in the same time span as the much appraised Prehistoric Planet, comparisons is bound to take place and scrutinized by paleontological nerds. Suffice to say, the level of inaccuracies this series has in comparison to Prehistoric Planet has led fans of latter to accuse this series on being reliant on cliches and "block-buster level flashiness" (not helped by behind-the-scenes clips showing the concept designers explicitly changed certain designs mid-production to be scarier or cooler.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Most of the prehistoric life segments have been criticized for showing only how predator triumphs over prey, and vice versa, or how one animal group replaced another because it's "superior" to an older animal group, without much deviation. Negative comparisons have been made with the recent Prehistoric Planet in this factor, which showed its prehistoric animals in many unique and creative situations by contrast, rather than simply perpetuating the idea nature is only red in tooth and claw.
• Memetic Mutation: The REAL Jurassic World Dominion prologue ^Explanation Many have half-jokingly suggested the series is a prequel to Jurassic Park due to the involvement of Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg, and VFX provider Industrial Light & Magic actually modifying the dinosaurs' models from the Jurassic World trilogy, even calling it a better prologue then the one in Jurassic World Dominion.
• Padding:
  • Despite being heavily marketed as a documentary series focused on the history of life on Earth, with dinosaurs and other ancient life at the forefront of trailers, posters, intro, and supplementary material, roughly 75% of the footage is of the modern day. In most cases, it's just used to restate a fact already noted in regards to a prehistoric creature or habitat and using a present day example that's tangentially related to this fact (such as showing Deinonychus pack-hunting, and then showing a fight between ants and termites, just because ants and termites are also social animals, or showing an early prehistoric amphibian, then showing different clips of various modern amphibian species, just to remind the audience what an amphibian is), and the present day footage will run much longer than the prehistoric era footage.^note For example, the clip of the Deinonychus hunt is under five minutes long, while the termite and ant fight is close to seven minutes long, and the clip of the prehistoric amphibians is about four minutes long, and then cuts to a sequence of modern amphibians that's almost nine minutes long.
  • Another complaint is how much of the series' runtime is repeatedly used on footage of volcanos erupting, sweeping landscape shots, and slow-motion crashing waves, simply to reiterate the same fact almost every episode about how the tectonic activity moves the continents around and how environments changed over time, over and over.
• So Okay, It's Average: General opinions for the series is that the visuals and effects are largely great and the information is comprehensive, but the pace is confusing, the material is bland, repetitive, and covers stuff you've likely seen ten times before if you've watched any nature or dinosaur documentary in the past few decades, and the science is rather iffy, leading to an overall inconsistent and mediocre experience.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The tsunami caused by the K-Pg extinction event looks incredibly 2-D from certain angles, making it look like it was done with a photoshop tool.
  • The early birds depicted hatching directly after the extinction event are clearly just baby emus.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The series has gotten significant criticism for the fact it mostly just reiterating the same old stuff for both modern and prehistoric life, presenting material and species which had already been covered in numerous documentaries prior (primarily BBC ones like Planet Earth and Walking with…), without any real differences. Terror birds being outcompeted by the "superior" Smilodon, poison-dart frogs carrying their tadpoles into bromeliads, Gorgonopsids hunting Scutosaurus right before the Great Dying, Komodo dragons hunting water buffalo with a toxic bite, a Triceratops herd making a standoff against Tyrannosaurus with their horns, Nile crocodiles ambushing wildebeests, ice age humans hunting by chasing prey off cliffs, sneaky cuttlefish males, and so on and so forth.

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