Il mondo senza di noi

Viruses can only parasitize their host until they kill it. In doing so, they will also kill themselves. However, the Earth is a robust organism; it has recovered from meteorite bombardment, endured several ice ages, and survived five mass extinctions. It will also recover from this, the sixth, caused by a species, which will take with it the wildlife and most of the animals that exist today. This documentary theorizes what would happen if people vaporized out of nowhere. It does not consider the causes that would lead to such an event. When that happens, for several thousand years, it will not look as nice (green and full of life) as it is presented in this series.

This is a decent documentary movie describif what could have happened if all people were gone. The idea is not new, truly so, but this is a very exciting and really chilling sensatio to see what will happen after. The film is okay, pacing is good, and the commentaries are useful, but then, there sre two serious drawbacks which hamper and hinder the whole thing - first, rather poorly executed and naive CGI that make it look childish and rather...well...funny, and second, the ending section seems to be rushed and thus a bit bland, as we expected more and deeper and better. All in all, a nice try, full of great inights into chiiling reality of men gone off.

This movie was definitely interesting. I loved imagining what places like New York City would look like without people. The images of zoo animals' establishing an ecosystem in deserted cities really makes you think. The one thing that I didn't quite get was how people are going to disappear and all the wildlife still live on unaffected. I know that was not supposed to go into how people vanished but the entire premise was kind of like if we took off in a spaceship or rapture or something. I think that in reality, whatever causes people end our run on earth will affect most of the wildlife also. Regardless, this was a well thought out film that causes us to think of humanity as a very temporary part of earth's history and not the end-all-be-all of the universe.

You can see this coming a mile away in the TV guide and, even when I watched it hoping for more, it did just what it suggested it would. There are lots of "what if" films out there and some of them are genuinely interesting and informative, however Life After People is not one of them. Instead it goes down the road of so many of them and just focuses on the special effects of the "what if" rather than the substance. This approach makes for a good 30 minute long programme, I'll give you that, but here the idea is stretched out to 90 minutes, with plenty of advert breaks to help you along.

The effects are pretty good though; not Hollywood standards by any means but for the minute they are pretty good and reasonably imaginative. It doesn't help to be shown the same shots over and over again though because it does make the viewer realise just how much padding there is throughout. The experts are all on hand to provide justification and explanation but none of them can get passed the problem that it is not that interesting a question in the first place due to its lack of relevance. They all take about how quickly nature will come back in etc but nobody can make it important or interesting beyond the "oh, that's nice" level of interest. I know there is debate about how quickly things would really happen versus what was said in this film but for me the bigger thing to work out is why it manages to make me care so little? Life after People provides effect shots of buildings falling and cities overgrown. As such it is already competing with Hollywood sci-fi's with much bigger budgets to play with. It does an OK job with this but has nowhere near enough to show or talk about to fill even half of the running time and just gets repetitive and dull long before it is over. A shame really, because it would be a better film had the pressure not been on to fill space as much as possible whether the film merited it or not.

It was in a "scratched" bin at an op-shop, but all three discs played OK. Each of the ten programmes is only 42 minutes, so at one/day, it kept me interested for quite a while.

In each episode, I found at least one really interesting item, mostly about abandoned places... a village in Dorset, a whole city in Indiana, a whole (small) island near Japan. And then there was the plants side. I knew a little about the vine Kudzu, and now I know a bit more, and Brazilian ginger too.

Yes, the frequent CGI's of pancaking buildings gets a bit tiresome, especially when I know that this will take many decades before it happens, and, as others have pointed out, no one will see it, so who- cares? And only some of the "experts" were interesting. Although made in 2007, there were no shots of the twin towers demise.