It's a revealing indication of the times we live in that hundreds of comments are made on idmb about nonsensical Hollywood blockbusters, but only one - before this - on an exceptionally interesting television series about the history and future of our planet.
Presenter Iain Stewart takes us on a tour of the forces that have shaped the earth over the last four and a half billion years: volcanoes, atmosphere, ice and oceans. A basic understanding of the material shown should be part of everyone's education.
The worst aspects of the five part series are the visual intrusions made by the over- enthusiastic presenter. He flaps his hands, twists his mouth into many strange shapes, and speaks in a Scottish accent strong enough to require sub-titling (not provided) for many English speakers.
There are also too many of the rapid cuts that seem to be standard fare these days, as directors assume that viewers have the attention span of a goldfish unless bludgeoned into wakefulness by flashing images too rapid to see properly.
Behind the flaws lies a wealth of information, often accompanied by startling images. The crater of an Ethiopian volcano shows, on a tiny scale hugely accelerated, the same features as the shifting of land masses as the tectonic plates separate and clash because of the forces from the molten core. A man jumps from a plane and surfs the atmosphere, illustrating that air is a fluid. We see irrefutable evidence of the shrinking of glaciers and the potential for melting permafrost to release methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
If we don't already know, we learn that Earth was completely icebound for millions of years, that ice ages have come and gone, that the Mediterranean has repeatedly disappeared when land movements closed the Straits of Gibraltar, that the global oceanic currents have stopped again and again causing massive extinctions, and much more.
The final episode explains how unusual and possibly unique our planet must be despite the billions of stars in our own galaxy and the billions of galaxies elsewhere. There are plenty of references to climate change that might be the result of human activity, but life on earth will survive with or without modern homo sapiens.
Never mind the irritations. 'The Power of the Earth' is a fascinating, alarming, reassuring and chastening series. Maybe it could have been done better, but it's good enough to be seen by anyone with an interest in history, the extraordinary ability of homo sapiens to understand the universe, and the shape of things to come.
Presenter Iain Stewart takes us on a tour of the forces that have shaped the earth over the last four and a half billion years: volcanoes, atmosphere, ice and oceans. A basic understanding of the material shown should be part of everyone's education.
The worst aspects of the five part series are the visual intrusions made by the over- enthusiastic presenter. He flaps his hands, twists his mouth into many strange shapes, and speaks in a Scottish accent strong enough to require sub-titling (not provided) for many English speakers.
There are also too many of the rapid cuts that seem to be standard fare these days, as directors assume that viewers have the attention span of a goldfish unless bludgeoned into wakefulness by flashing images too rapid to see properly.
Behind the flaws lies a wealth of information, often accompanied by startling images. The crater of an Ethiopian volcano shows, on a tiny scale hugely accelerated, the same features as the shifting of land masses as the tectonic plates separate and clash because of the forces from the molten core. A man jumps from a plane and surfs the atmosphere, illustrating that air is a fluid. We see irrefutable evidence of the shrinking of glaciers and the potential for melting permafrost to release methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
If we don't already know, we learn that Earth was completely icebound for millions of years, that ice ages have come and gone, that the Mediterranean has repeatedly disappeared when land movements closed the Straits of Gibraltar, that the global oceanic currents have stopped again and again causing massive extinctions, and much more.
The final episode explains how unusual and possibly unique our planet must be despite the billions of stars in our own galaxy and the billions of galaxies elsewhere. There are plenty of references to climate change that might be the result of human activity, but life on earth will survive with or without modern homo sapiens.
Never mind the irritations. 'The Power of the Earth' is a fascinating, alarming, reassuring and chastening series. Maybe it could have been done better, but it's good enough to be seen by anyone with an interest in history, the extraordinary ability of homo sapiens to understand the universe, and the shape of things to come.