Customer Reviews

PBS Nature Series : Amazing Places - Africa [Blu-ray]

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I have to admit that the standard for this kind of production has been set by the BBC on films like Planet Earth and Galapagos. This film has great video images, but the story line is rather weak and could have used a lot more research. The background music tries to follow popular African music, but makes one wonder: How would you like to hear a background consisting of American spirituals, or American folk music, in a film about the eastern White Tailed Deer? It just left me thinking that the animal world, in both cases, has little to do with human culture, and it was distracting. Linkage with several side-themes on different animals or plants was not too good, and more on the distinctive African flora would have been of interest. The relationship of the fisherman to the habitat in the piece on Victoria Falls was not well developed, and one wonders what the story was supposed to be here. People live near the falls? What is their relationship to the wildlife in the area that were depicted? Still, the images in the blu-ray version make this a very interesting set of video segments, even if the narrative and the story line left us hanging in places (for example, did the Impala just hang around in the burnt out area until the green grass returned there? Was the whole place burned up, or was that brown grassland in the background still intact? The temporal sequence of the Impala herd could have been better described, as it appears from the film that they move up into the mountains, just in time to get caught up in the bad weather that forces them down again. In one place the narrative suggests that they just move where they want to, so maybe the migrations vary from year to year. Several times, animals (Impala or Baboon) are shown dead, cause unknown. How did that young baboon (Was it the same one shown previously?) die? Apart from narrative and story line, once again, the video is great. It would be nice to have an alternative sound track, say with only natural sounds, or descriptive without the story line.

I have one more issue with PBS/Nature, other than what appears to be a problem with narrative quality. They keep putting advertisements for their web site as banners across their videos, right in front of the images. This is not too cool when you are trying to experience the imagery, and they are trying to distract you with something that could be covered in a separate menu item. What gives here?