Call it the "Dronepocalypse": Drone footage is all the rage in recent documentaries

The New York Times

Documentaries have become overly dependent on drone footage in recent years, from O.J.: Made in America to The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley to Lorena to Leaving Neverland and Planet Earth II. "For documentary film viewers, sometimes it feels like the dronepocalypse is already here," says Bilge Ebiri. "Over the past few years, shots taken by drone — steadily gliding images looking down at houses and cities and fields below — have become epidemic in documentary, no matter the subject." Ebiri adds: "Even some of those documentaries that don’t seem to need a sky-high point-of-view can have their own, fascinating internal logic. The copious drone shots in Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland, about two men who allege that the pop singer Michael Jackson raped them when they were children, help offset the excruciatingly intimate interviews about sexual assault."