How Earth Made Us (DVD) (film on DVD)
from 2 Entertain Video
Directed by: Peter Chinn
Starring: Geoffrey Boulton, Gary Stevens, Dan Durda, Martin Van Kranendonk, Mark A.S. McMenamin
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Audience Rating: Exempt
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DVD Box Price: £12.93
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Invigorating Earth  Sent: 11 June 2010
I think this is one of the best geographical documentaries I have ever seen. Spectacularly filmed and awesome scenery!
Iain Stewart is a great presenter, always on the go, touching, tasting, feeling the elements of the Earth. It's a lesson in Geography but certainly not boring.
I don't know why but love the scene with the bubbling oil - it is like boiling treacle and really strange. In fact there are quite a few strange and wonderful things in the series. Like the Arctic Underground Svalbard Seed Vault where they are gathering samples of all the earth's known seeds and grains, like human squirrels. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where a 100 million tons of plastic bottles and waste drift across the ocean and cover an area twice the size of the USA. And the Naica Cave which is 50 degrees C , 100% humidity and filled with gigantic, weird but amazing rod-shaped crystals. And Iain Stewart isn't scared to get stuck in - when he visits places like the Naica Cave that are too hostile for humans, he just gets kitted up in protective clothing and breathing gear and wades on in!
All in all the Series is great. Not only is it really interesting and exciting but also it is a beautifully filmed and edited documentary. Great stuff!
razzle dazzle Sent: 04 May 2010
"I want to rewrite the history books," says Stewart. That rang bells - I have faint memories of what must have been Journeys From the Centre of the Earth and Stewart's bizarre take on history - Alexander the great wasn't motivated by his megalomania, his alcoholism, his obsession with avenging his father against his assassins and Greece against the Persians: - no, he was motivated by a pre-Cambrian outcrop getting in his way at Sardis! Stewart seems to have toned down these risible notions in this new series, but the pretention is still there. Except that this time, most of the history he talks about is already in the history books if you know where to look. If he wants to humanise geology, that's admirable, but if he also wants to de-humanise history, then that seems a bit self-contradictory to me (as well as being old-fashioned). I don't really need my geology to be humanised, although I have a degreee in Humanities: I'm happy to go looking at rapid-cooling fractures in rocks in the Lake District, and see the pahoehoe and "a a" in Lanzarote (mind, these names couldn't be more humanist).
Although I carp, I do basically love Iain Stewart. But I refuse to be afraid to criticise my heroes (I basically loved Journeys From the Centre of the Earth). This DVD disappointed me. I saw the Wind episode on telly and knew I wouldn't be able to see any more, so I gave up watching and pre-ordered the DVD. Disc 1 was fine (apart from the overloud, grotesquely turgid music, which you need to play through your telly rather than your hi-fi in order to tone it down), but disc 2 disappointed for various reasons - a mere two episodes; and I didn't like the Human Planet ep much: there was unwelcome repetition of the South Dakota and Water Cycle material, and a lot of it found me asking "so what"? For instance, the observation that our plastic will become rocks in billions of years' time. Vaguely interesting, but so what? Good rocks? Bad rocks? If he wanted me to feel guilt, he didn't succeed. The theory that the Neolithic prevented an ice-age is interesting, but it's only a theory (it became fact a sentence or two later, as in all those pyramidiot-style programmes), and I'm not yet convinced it holds water - we had already heard how the whole of Europe and (we infer) the Americas and Asia and most other places were totally forested over until after the Romans - the amount of agriculture until then was relatively microscopic, although we'd need to see the size of China's rice-based agriculture to decide (paddy fields produce a lot of methane). And no mention of the Aswan dam in ep 5 - I thought that was a sad omission.
And they flew all the way to the Bahamas just so that Stewart could stand on a beach for 10 seconds telling us how Columbus discovered the trade winds? Come on!
All in all then, three stars would be mean. I loved some of it: - the step wells, Angkor Wat, etc, (seeing places I'll never visit is one of the things I enjoy about programmes like this). But it could have been better. I'm in a generous mood - 4 stars for the eye-openers - it's razzle dazzle, but I do like it.
Fantastic! Sent: 22 April 2010
What can you say? Iain Stewart tells it like it is in his inimical style. He shows us the power that lurks beneath our feet and the fragility of our own position, which we ignore at our peril. Having said that, it's that very power that has made us, so as the Earth can destroy so it creates.
Excellent Visuals- Intelligently presented Sent: 20 March 2010
If it has Iain Stewart presenting, it's going to be good. I enjoyed this documentary. The Bluray Hi Res is just as I had hoped. The graphics is excellent. The story interesting, and it brings to light some new places and facts of which I was unaware.
Buy it!
Hi-def makes the most of the stunning visuals. Intelligent entertainment Sent: 07 February 2010
Some documentaries are wasted on Blu-Ray, but the visual images on this series are so strong that it's really worth seeing it in high definition.
The BBC's science dept has out-done itself recently, and this series is one of the most lively and engaging they've produced. It looks at how the geology of our planet has shaped human development and society, and uses stunning photography from around the globe to illustrate each episode.
I enjoyed Professor Iain Stewart's previous series Earth : The Power of the Planet - Complete BBC Series [DVD], and he's a very likeable, down to earth and knowledgeable presenter. That's just as well because he's on screen for most of each hour-long episode he and provides the narration, too; there may well be a team of researchers working in the background but few other experts or talking heads play a part in this series.
Instead, Prof Stewart travels to iconic, beautiful locations like the Sahara desert, the West African coast, a crystal cave in Mexico, holes in the Iranian desert, frozen Iceland, the Indian monsoon and a salt glacier while examining how geological forces have played a part in the rise and fall of various human civilisations.
Different episodes look at volcanoes and earthquakes; the forces of the wind and how it affects weather and trade, water and our use of it in irrigation, and fire; oil, and the industrial revolution. Some of the snapshots are obvious and familiar, and an explanation of why fault lines cause earthquakes was extremely timely. But some of the segments are utterly unexpected and wonderful, like the astonishing crystal cave (which will look wonderful in high-definition) and the amazing living bridge in the Himalayas which withstands the rushing floodwaters every year.
Things get a little bit maudlin when Prof Stewart considers the slave trade, and again when he gives a mini-lecture on how some civilisations fell because they failed to take good care of scant resources. It's hard to give a lecture on living frugally and taking care of the planet when you've obviously been galloping around it for the sake of entertainment - although there is quite a bit of striking new footage in these films, plenty of it could have been illustrated by archive material and all those air miles could have been saved...
However, the majority of the programmes are heavy on information which is presented in an entertaining manner, and the moralising is kept to a minimum. There's quite a bit of use of graphics which come in really handy explaining how different wind systems work and why weather is so difficult to predict. I now know what the Jet Stream is! From that we can understand why some areas of the world were easier for Europeans to reach, and why certain trade routes developed, and why some islands took forever to be `found' by the first sailing ships.
Likewise, the role of fire in establishing the industrial revolution in the old world, with all of the effects that history has had on the modern world, was fascinating.
Prof Stewart has produced a wonderfully intriguing series of visually impressive lectures, which really do explain just how the forces of our planet have shaped human society. Not a dull moment in them; and the DVD set comes with a behind the scenes documentary too. Suitable for all ages and any enquiring minds. The Blu-Ray version scores more highly for me than the standard one, simply because it's worth seeing all that globe-trotting footage in its highest available standard.
9/10
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Associated dvd film / movie categories: Documentaries & Biographies, Documentaries,, Documentary, Television |
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