Movies Like A Beautiful Planet
If you loved A Beautiful Planet's Documentary storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

Space Station 3D
Some 220 miles above Earth lies the International Space Station, a one-of-a-kind outer space laboratory that 16 nations came together to build. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this extraordinary structure in this spectacular IMAX film. Viewers will blast off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia for this incredible journey -- IMAX's first-ever space film. Tom Cruise narrates.

Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine
The James Webb Telescope stirs imaginations with vivid photos of distant galaxies. This documentary tracks its historic journey from inception to launch.

Baraka
A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.

Good Night Oppy
The inspirational true story of Opportunity, a rover that was sent to Mars for a 90-day mission but ended up surviving for 15 years. Follow Opportunity’s groundbreaking journey on Mars and the remarkable bond forged between a robot and her humans millions of miles away.

Life in a Day
A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.

An Inconvenient Truth
A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.

Hubble
An IMAX 3D camera chronicles the effort of 7 astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

Elstree 1976
A documentary about ten very different lives connected by having appeared onscreen wearing masks or helmets in Star Wars.
More Movies Like A Beautiful Planet

Capturing Avatar
Capturing Avatar is a feature length behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Avatar. It uses footage from the film's development, as well as stock footage from as far back as the production of Titanic in 1995. Also included are numerous interviews with cast, artists, and other crew members. The documentary was released as a bonus feature on the extended collector's edition of Avatar.

Ocean with David Attenborough
David Attenborough takes viewers on a breathtaking journey showing there is nowhere more vital for our survival, more full of life, wonder, or surprise, than the ocean. Through spectacular sequences featuring coral reefs, kelp forests and the open ocean, Attenborough shares why a healthy ocean keeps the entire planet stable and flourishing.

Cameraperson
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
The story of life on our planet by the man who has seen more of the natural world than any other. In more than 90 years, Attenborough has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of our planet and documenting the living world in all its variety and wonder. Addressing the biggest challenges facing life on our planet, the film offers a powerful message of hope for future generations.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.

Samsara
Filmed over nearly five years in twenty-five countries on five continents, and shot on seventy-millimetre film, Samsara transports us to the varied worlds of sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes, and natural wonders.

National Geographic: Journey to the Edge of the Universe
In one single, epic camera move we journey from Earth's surface to the outermost reaches of the universe on a grand tour of the cosmos, to explore newborn stars, distant planets, black holes and beyond.

Chasing Coral
Coral reefs are the nursery for all life in the oceans, a remarkable ecosystem that sustains us. Yet with carbon emissions warming the seas, a phenomenon called “coral bleaching”—a sign of mass coral death—has been accelerating around the world, and the public has no idea of the scale or implication of the catastrophe silently raging underwater.

Koyaanisqatsi
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

The Mars Generation
Aspiring teenage astronauts reveal that a journey to Mars is closer than you think.

Naqoyqatsi
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.

The 11th Hour
A look at the state of the global environment including visionary and practical solutions for restoring the planet's ecosystems. Featuring ongoing dialogues of experts from all over the world, including former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, former head of the CIA R. James Woolse
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with A Beautiful Planet (2016): Documentary themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of A Beautiful Planet.
See full details for A Beautiful Planet (2016)