YMMV / Planet Earth

• Anvilicious: While the first collection had tidbits of environmentalist messages, II takes these types of messages and runs with them, to the point where there is a reminder that Humans Are Bastards in almost every episode. And III takes this message and runs with it still further, but tempers it by mentioning steps being taken to mitigate the damage and restore what has been lost and damaged.
• Awesome Music: The title theme to Planet Earth II, Planet Earth Suite was composed by Hans Zimmer. It's every bit as majestic as a series like this should have.
• Broken Base: While II is generally agreed to be a fantastic sequel, some people feel that two elements of the new series diminish its quality:
  • The more liberal use of Padding. Does it enrich the cinematic feel of the series, or does it make episodes excessively slow?
  • The series' more blatant Humans Are Bastards stance. Is it Brutal Honesty about our ways, and a message about our destruction of the environment? Or is it outdated fear-mongering that is a completely unnecessary addition to the commentary? Unlike the above, the debate over this gets quite heated, so it's best to leave it at that.
• Even Better Sequel: Planet Earth II has received critical acclaim due to its cinematic feel, even more so than its already acclaimed 2006 predecessor.
• Heartwarming Moments: If the visuals of this series don't highlight the beauty and spectacle of nature, nothing does.
  • "Cities" in II shows a clan of spotted hyenas sneaking into the city of Harar, and the humans feeding them. The city actually has a tradition of feeding the hyenas, and there is enough trust for the hyenas to get close to the humans, some of whom hand feed them.
• Killer App: One of the first for Blu-ray, HD DVD and High Definition in general.
• Memetic Badass: The Marine Iguana hatchling that outran an entire army of snakes, even wrestling itself free from them at one point in a clip that went viral.
• Moment of Awesome: The chase scene between the marine iguana and the racer snakes. Jesus Christ, but also, holy cow, that's one badass hatchling.
• Padding: Not as bad as many other examples, but there's a lot more slow-motion segments in II than its predecessor.
• Shocking Moments: Invoked by the producers on the racer snakes segment:
  "We wanted to do a marina iguana story, but everybody has seen swimming marine iguanas before. The cameraman, who lives in the Galapagos, mentioned he had filmed racer snakes taking baby marine iguanas before. I watched the footage and thought, wow, that’s pretty epic, but it was very much one snake, hiding in ambush, little iguana comes back, and it would grab him. When we got to the location, we saw one hatchling come out, it ran across the beach, went towards this rocky slope, and literally this wall turned into all the snakes, and they all poured out of the rocks. We were all like, oh my God, did you just see that?"
• Signature Scene: Plenty of them:
  • The wolf and the wild dog chase scene in the premiere, filmed almost completely from air.
  • The great white shark breach attack from the premiere and later in the 9th episode.
  • Lion pride vs a young elephant from the grassland episode.
  • The desperate polar bear attacking a group of walrus.
  • One of the first documentary to filmed snow leopards hunting behavior in the wild.
  • The spectacular chase scene in the "Islands" episode, in which a newly hatched marine iguana runs for its life from a group of racer snakes.