Cedric Sagne
Life after people is a ripoff of Alan Weisman "World without us" (first of all by using a title structure in three words, but whatever).The basic thought experiment of Alan Weisman is aimed not so much at looking at how nature would recover after we have left, and how buildings etc deteriorate but in fact analysing to what extent our actions on the environment are permanent.Life after people (the main program) hardly mentions our use of plastics, our pollution of the planet with PCBs, how permanent nuclear waste will be and focuses on the mild, innocent traces of us that will be erased easily: wood, paper, iron, cement. Overall both the program and the series remain a list of crumbling buildings, repeated over and over again, with the same engineering viewpoint.The series (which I lazily address with this comment too) do mention this a bit more, along with our impact on fauna (eg bison population), or the recovery of fish population due to our current overfishing. Too little still.The documentary is reasonably good, padded with special effects that are shown over and over again, and with a shift of focus to American landmarks, which is understandable as it was made for US TV.The content presents a somewhat idealistic and benign-ized vision of our impact on the planet, which really misses the point of actually addressing what are the harmful things we are doing right now and which our descendants will curse us for.
estimated-proffitt
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.
EchoMaRinE
Good work but relies so much on the fact that people disappear as they evaporate. Anything that can kill us till the last man shall have some effect on the environment that we live I assume. Even a deadly epidemic can not kill everyone instantly. From my point of view, they should have dwell on the possible causes of our extinction and create scenarios depending on these. If it is climate changes for example, buildings will fall before they rot because of hurricanes or what so ever.Another point is, once a species like human disappears totally from a habitat, a lot of other species must disappear as well. As we are the main predators on the planet, without our existence, it is quite difficult to say what can survive and what can not. They tell the story in a way that nothing but people disappears. They focus so much on trees and plants. If we disappear, the bug population will explode since there will be a lot of corpse to eat. After they are done with us, they can destroy the forests. What I want to say is, we already changed the ecosystem some much. Without us, before a fair balance, another species (may be bugs) that may not be as sane as us (I mean it, we do not destroy totally) may destroy more species in a quite short time period than we did over the history of man.
Framescourer
It's very difficult to get one's head around the basic concept, in a way. One imagines that a world without humans is entirely possible, but only after a catastrophic event leaving its mark on the world: nuclear war, viral epidemic or perhaps even collision with a meteor. In any case the assumption is that the world we leave would be burning, infected or crushed.The beauty of the film - and it is beautiful, despite the repetitious CGI montages necessarily concocted to show the world's great landmarks under water or foliage - is in this unlikely predicate. If we simply weren't here, what would become of the world? Professorial types talk about the likely outcomes in their specialist areas, how wild or urban life readjusts, the rise of plant life, the decay of unmaintained constructions. It's wonderfully uncontroversial. There's no moralising, no wistfulness or pity, just a technical and statistical explanation of the survival algorithm of non-human life.I think David de Vries is probably right to include a rather melodramatic Day After Tomorrowish score and repeat images of the great monuments of civilisation (cities) crumbling. After all, the drama of the film for us is the unspoken one - that we have gone. I like the non-drama though and, with Struan Rodger's straightforward narration, I found the experience rather wonderful and positive. 6/10
AD
