Life After People (2008)

Visit the ghostly villages surrounding Chernobyl (abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear disaster), travel to remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for abandoned towns that ... See full summary »

Director:

David de Vries

Writer:

David de Vries

Stars:

Struan Rodger, John Anderson, David Brin

Nominated for 3 Primetime Emmys. Another 1 nomination.

Cast

Credited cast:
Struan Rodger	...	Himself - Narrator (voice)
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
John Anderson	...	Himself
David Brin	...	Himself
Bill Bruninga	...	Himself
Ron Chesser	...	Himself
Ray Coppinger	...	Himself
Eric Doehne	...	Himself
Sergey Gashchak	...	Himself
John Hadidian	...	Himself
Kevin Harrison	...	Himself
Gordon Masterton	...	Himself
Nabil Nasr	...	Himself
Alex Nickson	...	Himself
Howard Oliver	...	Himself (as Dr. Howard Oliver)
Stephen R. Palumbi	...	Himself (as Steve Palumbi)

Storyline

Visit the ghostly villages surrounding Chernobyl (abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear disaster), travel to remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for abandoned towns that have vanished from view in only a few decades, then head beneath the streets of New York to see how subway tunnels may become watery canals. A visual journey, LIFE AFTER PEOPLE is a thought provoking adventure that combines movie-quality visual effects with insights from experts in the fields of engineering, botany, ecology, biology, geology, climatology, and archeology to demonstrate how the very landscape of our planet will change in our absence.

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Plot Keywords:

chernobyl | end of mankind | chicago illinois | wild life | storm | 

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Taglines:

What If

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Genres:

Documentary | Sci-Fi

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Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

21 January 2008 (USA)

Also Known As:

After Days

Company Credits

Production Co:

Flight 33 Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

108 min

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Goofs

There is an footage file. In which clip, appears a worker working and walking on a bridge support wire and then the worker disappears (is digitally removed), but his shadow on the surface of the bridge support wire is not cleared and continues walking.

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Quotes

Narrator: What would happen if every human being on Earth disappeared? At some point in the future, this could be the fate of our planet. This isn't the story of how we might vanish, it is the story of what happens to the world we leave behind.

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Connections

Followed by Life After People (2009)

User Reviews

Crumbling buildings, but little more

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.