This documentary has the misfortune of being filmed for 1996, before better technology allowed for a clearer picture. On the audio front, it has the misfortune of being narrated by someone who sounds medicated.
It's a long hard slog through the roughly 100 minutes of this one. You see an obviously expensive mission, but you don't see much in the way of results, which are all to come at some future date. There's lots of talk about how wonderful all the people are, and how amazing all their equipment is, and how cool their cinematographer is (I beg to differ) and gee isn't this a lot of fun to play around in the Galapagos. But not much real science.
And on the subject of specimens, more should have been done to explain why live specimens needed to be captured and brought to the surface to die, rather than being simply photographed in their habitat (as was clearly acceptable for one of the invertebrates, which was photographed). The narrator crows that using this submersible, species could be brought to the surface and live for as long as a few hours or days. But we don't call that living when humans do it for only a few hours or days. That's called dying. They were dying for a few hours or a few days, because they had been transported to an alien environment, with no intent of supporting their ability to live. It's distasteful to watch over an hour of gleeful juvenile scientists talk about capturing "living" creatures which they delight in watching slowly die before they pin them to a board like hunters' trophies.
There is some amount of time given to other topics, like invasive species brought in with humans, and the human invasion itself, which includes illegal fishing.
Also, if you claim you're going to show evolution "right before your eyes" and prove that natural selection "is a fact", then the film should deliver that. It fails miserably, as it must. Evolution and natural selection are things that take long periods of time to observe in human-scale wild animal species. You certainly can't see it in 24 days, the length of this expedition. Newly discovered species are not, by themselves, evidence of evolution or natural selection. They are evidence that we haven't explored the entire planet yet.
Anyway, I think this film was a waste of my time, and probably yours as well.
It's a long hard slog through the roughly 100 minutes of this one. You see an obviously expensive mission, but you don't see much in the way of results, which are all to come at some future date. There's lots of talk about how wonderful all the people are, and how amazing all their equipment is, and how cool their cinematographer is (I beg to differ) and gee isn't this a lot of fun to play around in the Galapagos. But not much real science.
And on the subject of specimens, more should have been done to explain why live specimens needed to be captured and brought to the surface to die, rather than being simply photographed in their habitat (as was clearly acceptable for one of the invertebrates, which was photographed). The narrator crows that using this submersible, species could be brought to the surface and live for as long as a few hours or days. But we don't call that living when humans do it for only a few hours or days. That's called dying. They were dying for a few hours or a few days, because they had been transported to an alien environment, with no intent of supporting their ability to live. It's distasteful to watch over an hour of gleeful juvenile scientists talk about capturing "living" creatures which they delight in watching slowly die before they pin them to a board like hunters' trophies.
There is some amount of time given to other topics, like invasive species brought in with humans, and the human invasion itself, which includes illegal fishing.
Also, if you claim you're going to show evolution "right before your eyes" and prove that natural selection "is a fact", then the film should deliver that. It fails miserably, as it must. Evolution and natural selection are things that take long periods of time to observe in human-scale wild animal species. You certainly can't see it in 24 days, the length of this expedition. Newly discovered species are not, by themselves, evidence of evolution or natural selection. They are evidence that we haven't explored the entire planet yet.
Anyway, I think this film was a waste of my time, and probably yours as well.
