The film opens with some scenes from the 1937 movie, "Lost Horizons," starring Ronald Coleman. Coleman and his companions find spiritual peace in a remote valley of the Himalayas called Shangri-La. The place and the things it stood for -- stability, tranquility, moderation -- became iconic, for a while. When asked where Doolittle's B-25 bombers came from in order to strike Japanese cities apparently out of nowhere, President Roosevelt answered "Shangri-La."
Well, there was no Shangri-La of course. Wood tells us right off the bat that the place was invented in the 1930s by novelist James Hilton, but then makes an inferential leap and links the fictional city to a mythical place called Shambhla in some scripture from Hinduism.
Knowing that it doesn't exist in any physical sense, Wood and his crew set out to explore some isolated locations with historical resonance on the plateau behind the Himalayas. They're the highest mountains on earth. They stand in or near the borders of India, Tibet, China, and Nepal, and cultural conflicts have led to periodic wars and mass slaughters in the region for a thousand years. China finally conquered the little country, though the Chinese have since expressed remorse. Peace and quiet.
The Shangri-La business is more or less dispensed with in the first half hour and what we get instead is a fascinating travelogue that takes us to places we've only heard about, and people who are buffered from what we call civilization, though not so isolated that they don't yearn for telephones.
The scenery is majestic, with or without myth. The elevations approach 15,000 feet. You can almost feel it when the bearded Michael Wood huffs and puffs along the cliffs in the thin air. There is little vegetation, no volatile terpines, no haze, no smoke, and the images are crisp and clean in the stark sunshine. Nobody treks through fields of snow. The terrain is of a tawny sand with rocky outcroppings and monumental buff mesas. On the horizon are a series of snow-capped sawtooth peaks. It's cold -- sub-zero centigrade -- even in summer. There is a vast lake of deep blue with its edges encrusted in rime.
We don't really learn that much about the people Wood visits in these remote villages. They're Tibetan Buddhists. The local Lama gets to sing a short religious song of some sort, but we never learn how they manage to survive in such a barren landscape. We see some heads of cattle and a dog or two -- but what do they EAT?
The film ends with another clip from "Random Harvest." Ronald Coleman stands on the path above Shangri-La, about to leave the place forever, with tears in his eyes. That 1937 movie lingered in my mind afterward. As I recall, someone in the movie asks why everyone doesn't come to live in Shangri-La, and Coleman replies, "If they did, it wouldn't remain a paradise for long." Now, that's rather a brutal comment. We all need a legendary land of Cockaigne but to get there we must learn to control our rage first. Homo sapiens has yet to prove Coleman wrong.
Well, there was no Shangri-La of course. Wood tells us right off the bat that the place was invented in the 1930s by novelist James Hilton, but then makes an inferential leap and links the fictional city to a mythical place called Shambhla in some scripture from Hinduism.
Knowing that it doesn't exist in any physical sense, Wood and his crew set out to explore some isolated locations with historical resonance on the plateau behind the Himalayas. They're the highest mountains on earth. They stand in or near the borders of India, Tibet, China, and Nepal, and cultural conflicts have led to periodic wars and mass slaughters in the region for a thousand years. China finally conquered the little country, though the Chinese have since expressed remorse. Peace and quiet.
The Shangri-La business is more or less dispensed with in the first half hour and what we get instead is a fascinating travelogue that takes us to places we've only heard about, and people who are buffered from what we call civilization, though not so isolated that they don't yearn for telephones.
The scenery is majestic, with or without myth. The elevations approach 15,000 feet. You can almost feel it when the bearded Michael Wood huffs and puffs along the cliffs in the thin air. There is little vegetation, no volatile terpines, no haze, no smoke, and the images are crisp and clean in the stark sunshine. Nobody treks through fields of snow. The terrain is of a tawny sand with rocky outcroppings and monumental buff mesas. On the horizon are a series of snow-capped sawtooth peaks. It's cold -- sub-zero centigrade -- even in summer. There is a vast lake of deep blue with its edges encrusted in rime.
We don't really learn that much about the people Wood visits in these remote villages. They're Tibetan Buddhists. The local Lama gets to sing a short religious song of some sort, but we never learn how they manage to survive in such a barren landscape. We see some heads of cattle and a dog or two -- but what do they EAT?
The film ends with another clip from "Random Harvest." Ronald Coleman stands on the path above Shangri-La, about to leave the place forever, with tears in his eyes. That 1937 movie lingered in my mind afterward. As I recall, someone in the movie asks why everyone doesn't come to live in Shangri-La, and Coleman replies, "If they did, it wouldn't remain a paradise for long." Now, that's rather a brutal comment. We all need a legendary land of Cockaigne but to get there we must learn to control our rage first. Homo sapiens has yet to prove Coleman wrong.
