History Channel: Life After People - A&E Home Video

Terrific first hour, then loses its way...

This TV prog has shamelessly ripped off the premise behind Alan Weisman's marvellous book The World Without Us without giving a jot of credit!

That said, the first hour is fantastic, particularly to any End Of The World genre buffs like myself, and deserves 5 stars in itself. There are some excellent interviews illustrated with truly awesome graphics, and you are left feeling just how transient homo sapien's time on this planet is. We may be having an enormous impact while we are here, but once we are gone little will be left to mark our presence. In two thousand years the pyramids will linger, as will the Hoover Dam (it's made of solid rock) and also the monument at Mt. Rushmore. But everything else will be gone, even the cities. Films like Planet of the Apes or Spielberg's AI got it all very wrong.

And it's here, an hour in, that the program loses steam. Which is a shame because a wee bit of restructuring would easily have given it better dramatic shape.

Well worth seeing, especially for any disaster nut, but it does peter out, and the makers really should have properly credited Weisman for the concept.

Science Faction

Possibly the greatest movie of its kind-that genre which covers all the "end of the World" movies which have been with us since the beginning and even before film eg Jules Verne.
Here is no dead people because they have simply vansished with no reason given
like a virus or plague.
Though its impossible for people to disappear just like that this film is about what would happen if such a thing took place.
It develops though years,centuries and ends at 25000 years/
The only life is the animals which roam the planet and its like it was on Day 5 according to the Bible.
Somehow it gaves a whole new meaning to John Lennon's song Imagine because that is what this IS-it imagines a World without people and takes thousands of years to remove all traces of a once thriving civilization.
The animals have simply adapted and cats have been able to make a better life than dogs who as domesticated pets were entirely reliant on Humans.Unlike cats who made their own rules and adopted US rather than the other way round.
Seagulls for instance are no lonnger reliant on the World's rubbish dumps because the oceans are full of fish
Insects breed abundantly as some species eat all the wood.
City streets are full of Zoo animals
During the first week all the food in the supermarkets goes rotten and is eventually eaten by dogs as the electricity supplies shut down,the only one not affected being the Hoover Dam in the States.
Grass grows in all the streets and through the years plants cause building s to crack and topple.Underground theres more chaos which results in wide spread flooding-and buildings which fall through the ground- and thats not counting the Thames Barrier which puts London under water.Fires rage uncontrolled in California,the ice caps melt and eventually the Earth looks like Mars.All that's left of man made structures are in the desert and eventually even they are covered in sand.
The Great Wall of China is intact and that's about it.
If a similar thing is found on the next Mars probe it will show life once existed there
Its all about the mould and spores which destroy all the books in the libraries,the crumbling to dust of all film and compact disc media and the eternal rust which collapses the bridges.
After 1000 years the Eiffel Tower falls.So does the Empire State Building.
And as the voiceover by Robert Powell points out a similar thing happenned in Chernobyl where not one person lives