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Ice Age Giants (2013)
Professor Alice Roberts journeys 40,000 years back in time on the trail of the great beasts of the Ice Age in this BBC documentary miniseries. It begins in the land of the sabre-tooth; North America, a continent that was half covered by ice. Alice traces the movements of Ice Age beasts like bear-sized sloths, vast mammoths and the strange beast known as the glyptodon. These leviathans were stalked by the meanest big cat that ever: Smilodon fatalis. In the Land of the Cave Bear, Alice ventures to the parts of the northern hemisphere, hit hardest by the cold. High in the mountains of Transylvania, a cave sealed for thousands of years reveals grisly evidence for a fight to the death between two staving giants, a cave bear and a cave lion. Yet Alice discovers that for woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths, the Ice Age created a bounty. In the final installment, Alice sets off on her last voyage back to the Ice Age to discover why the giants of the age went extinct.
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Waste of Money.
One of my all time favorites.
The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
This has all the mistakes of the current crop of BBC documentaries.1. An extremely painful style of delivery in voice over. This one is not quite delivered as 'reading to 4 years', but Alice Roberts is nearly that bad. That contrasts sharply with when she is talking to scientists; then she is just fine.2. Irritating techniques of direction. I lost count of the sections delivered with her walking away from the camera, talking over her shoulder. It was supposed to be lively and engaging, in fact it came across as just bad manners.3.More seriously, a complete failure to distinguish between 'fact' (or nearly certain fact) and conjecture. The often repeat CGI of the mating battle of male Glyptodons is pure conjecture. OK, but based on what? We weren't told. We weren't actually told it was a guess a either. There were many other such instances.I can see what they are trying to do, but people who are satisfied with Eastenders et al (long running UK soap) are never going to watch a program about science, no matter what you do to make it 'accessible' and undemanding.
Alice Roberts is a good choice for a TV natural history presenter but she doesn't quite save this program.For me there is too much repetition of the animations. There is also no overall progression or narration to the show and the series doesn't quite get anywhere.To sum up why this isn't that great.... too many animation repetitions, no substantial questions that lead to roundly answered off answers using overlay shots, animations and narrated explanations. Also too many nice fly-by shots of Roberts on a rock, Roberts on an icy rock, Roberts on another rock in the desert.I like that they tried - the program makers just need to try harder and learn from great documentaries (Planet Dinosaur or what she did in the Origins of Us).
I generally try to stay positive about documentaries because they are about facts and not business. However, in this day and age we have the tools and know-how to make documentaries very interesting. In that context this series fails.Make no mistake, people who are very interested in fossils and anatomy will love this. But I am speaking from an average viewer's perspective.Two of the three episodes are named after carnivores but the documentaries themselves are overwhelmingly about herbivores. They have about 3 times as much screen time as the carnivores. The names were probably given to attract viewers but if they understood that carnivores are more attractive then why not give them some more screen time ? Its the truth. Carnivores are simply more interesting to look at.I personally believe this kind of documentaries work best with a narrative and this didn't have one. Far too much time is spent on things that would hardly interest the majority of viewers, like looking at fossils and rocks. They should have focused on the animation.The animation itself is wonderful though. Never before have I seen a Smilodon walk with a grace that I believe closely resembles the true animal. The animations have quality in them but there's not enough of it.The background music should have been better. Its been 20 years since "Eternal Enemies". Nobody learned a damn thing.All this series had to do was use its great animation to show how carnivores coexisted in the plains south of the ice sheets. Things like the wooly mammoths and rhinos could have still featured in more interesting ways, like in interaction with the carnivores. But although the show has its moments, overall its quite boring and I fell asleep at a few points.I give it 6/10.