L.A. 10,000 B.C.
Okay, so we've all heard what a stinker the new movie 10,000 B.C. is, right? I actually went to see it, on Geotimes' nickel, along with a couple of other scientists so we could assess the scientific validity of the film for the magazine. Afterwards, I went to enter my own "review" into Netflix (2 stars out of 5) and I noticed there was another "10,000 B.C." film in the Netflix library: "L.A. 10,000 B.C.," a program from the Discovery Channel that examined the natural history of the Los Angeles area during that same time. I decided to check it out, and last night I watched it.
My brief review: It's not really a traditional natural history program. Instead it takes fossil evidence and uses it as a starting point for a "reality T.V." style stunt program. They take three L.A. stunt actors and "train" them to be Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Then they build pneumatic robots to mimic the teratorn and Columbian mammoth, and the stuntmen and women have to battle them. No joke. This resulted in some cool visuals, though: the mammoth crushing a ten-pound can of tomatoes and having all that red spray everywhere (mimicking the head of a Clovis hunter). And the footage of the stuntman being tossed thirty feet through the air by the "angry" robot mammoth was kind of cool too.
But you can't really call that a nature program. There were some cool facts presented, but the majority of the film was devoted to sensationalism of the encounters between humans and these Pleistocene species. The film was also very repetitive, taking half an hour's worth of material and stringing it out into 1.5 hours. It appeared to have been designed so anyone channel-surfing could get an orientation as to what the program was all about regardless of when they tuned in. That's kind of lame if you're watching the whole thing from start to finish, methinks.
My brief review: It's not really a traditional natural history program. Instead it takes fossil evidence and uses it as a starting point for a "reality T.V." style stunt program. They take three L.A. stunt actors and "train" them to be Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Then they build pneumatic robots to mimic the teratorn and Columbian mammoth, and the stuntmen and women have to battle them. No joke. This resulted in some cool visuals, though: the mammoth crushing a ten-pound can of tomatoes and having all that red spray everywhere (mimicking the head of a Clovis hunter). And the footage of the stuntman being tossed thirty feet through the air by the "angry" robot mammoth was kind of cool too.
But you can't really call that a nature program. There were some cool facts presented, but the majority of the film was devoted to sensationalism of the encounters between humans and these Pleistocene species. The film was also very repetitive, taking half an hour's worth of material and stringing it out into 1.5 hours. It appeared to have been designed so anyone channel-surfing could get an orientation as to what the program was all about regardless of when they tuned in. That's kind of lame if you're watching the whole thing from start to finish, methinks.
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