Queens

Beautiful cinematography, interesting subjects, but good God it was hard to stick with it as every 25 seconds there's another forcibly inserted pop song that tries to amplify the scene, but instead it just takes away from the entire experience. Each episode feels like it has 30 different clips of pop music. If you're used to the quality of a BBC type documentary with well chosen atmospheric music that enhances the scenes, this will feel like fingernails on a chalkboard. I liked the tenor and pacing of Angela Basset's voice, and again - the camera work is top notch. I hope the team behind this production keeps at it - but next time don't try to make it a music video, please.

Nat geo guys must be paid well to wait for this much time to make a video worth watching. This documentary was different from the things BBC films (both are fixed on animals anyway). And, the music mix was accurately paced. I guess when the whole world was preparing for coronavirus, you guys took a flight to africa and then the other places with every itinerary already laid out, combined with the approximate or fixed time for the end of the filming which I guess was parallel with the pandemic. There are things which are above my thinking grade. Well, Thanks for the animal kingdom for let them shoot and nat geo.

ANGELA BASSETT WAS FABULOUS AS THE NARRATOR IN THIS DOCUMENTARY!! VOICE IS SO REGAL AND POWERFUL. ALTHOUGH MOST INFORMATION I ALREADY KNEW IT WAS STILL INTERGTRING AND INFORMATIVE TO WATCH, FOR THE INFORMATION I DID NOT HAVE A CLUE ABOUT. THE ANT DISCUSSION WAS RIVETING. I HAD NEVER HEARD OF AN ORCHID BEE BEFORE. THE BONOBOS SECTION WAS INTERETING AS WELL. HOW THEY WORKED TOGETHER TO ENSURE NEW MOTHERS WERE TAKEN CARE OF ALONG WITH THE NEWBORS. LIKE A COMMUNAL MOMMY AND ME DAYCARE. HUMANS CAN LEARN A GREAT DEAL FROM ANIMALS AS FAR HAS HOW TO WORK TOGETHER AND SACARFICE ON SELF FOR THE GREATER GOOD.

Some seriously amazing cinematography and insanely brutal moments captured. They don't hold back on how cruel nature is and how animals can be to one another.

But the music ruins the show. That's not an exaggeration. Who is their target demographic here? It's as if they were trying to appeal to the urban TikTok generation, but it doesn't work at all. Whoever supervised the music should be fired. It's that bad, and for that reason alone I cannot recommend this show.

The story-telling of a few episodes also seemed forced, particularly the insect episode. Try an episode to see if you like it, the Lions and Elephant episodes are good. But you'll probably hate the music and it ruins the whole vibe.

MY RATING:

5: AVERAGE- Not bad, not good. Overall, it is probably forgettable. A few aspects kept me engaged enough to finish, but my attention likely drifted throughout. I wouldn't necessarily dissuade people from watching it, but also cannot recommend it. Wish I had watched something else instead.

The main problem of this documentary serial is the narrator, whose voice is way to low, vague and spiritless without energy. Even by increasing the volume, her low tiresome voice still became so difficult to catch sometimes. To tell the stories about the queens in the wild animal kingdoms, you need to use clear, strong and energetic voice to deliver the powerful, sometimes predictable, sometimes not quite predictable situations when those queens of the different species become weak and old and inevitably ousted by the young, upcoming and more vicious ones who come to take over and become the new queens. Yet this weak narrator's voice simply failed to deliver such wild animals' world.

The other weakness of this documentary is the random editing that jumped around. Often when we just got into that specific animal's world, it suddenly cut it short and began to tell another animal's stuff. Besides, all the contents of this documentary are already well-known and old information that we don't really want to renew or relearn. This is a very boring fact finding documentary that we could do without, especially with such terrible choice of a weal, seamless female voice just because the documentary needs to tell, that in animal kingdoms, the female ones usually reign over the males and the other females. Sounds more like a feminist's production, don't you think?

I could only watched the first episode and decided to quit in the middle.