Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

rsignal I get that Prof. Diamond is trying to answer the big questions of "why?" some civilizations invented "cargo" (material goods) and others didn't. I have not read the book, and just watched the first episode of this miniseries.A lot of the details of the argument ring true to me. The worldwide distribution of beasts of burden, types of farm crops and weather patterns all certainly have an effect of the rise of civilizations. But this can't be the whole story, or even the major part.When showing Diamond interacting wit the New Guinea folks, the emphasis was on the New Guinea struggles to get food. Hunting is inefficient, and farming is difficult labor due to the crops and lack of domesticated animals. Okay - but what was really striking is what was the lack of a written language. At the end of the episode, Diamond says something to the effect that if only geography had been different, then the New Guineans would have invented the helicopter, and not Westerners.The problem with this argument, is that in order to invent a helicopter, you must first understand fuel, energy, materials, densities, air molecules, physics, weather, and hydraulics, just to name a few things. I agree with Diamond that the New Guineans are plenty smart to understand all those things, but in order to generate knowledge, a society must have a physical way to disseminate knowledge (scrolls, printing presses, paper, etc) and culture of acceptance of new ideas (criticism of new ideas is fine, indeed necessary to refine knowledge). Diamond didn't discuss the role of culture at all, and this is a huge omission.Ultimately any theory of the rise of civilizations can be supported by cherry-picking data. This is a historians job, not a scientific endeavor. Diamond has his theory, and any number of people have their own theories. I personally don't find Diamond's theory to be very compelling.

gray4 I came to this with great expectations as a long-time admirer of Jared Diamond and his books, including 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. It was shown on UK TV as a 2+ hour documentary but it was painfully obvious that it originated as a 30-minute series. The result was that every half-hour or so the continuity was punctured by long and tedious repetitions of what had gone before - a real spoiler! The main themes of the book came across clearly and it was good to see Jared Diamond's personal first-hand responses to world events that he had previously only studied from a distance as an academic. But overall the programme was unbalanced, with far too much time devoted to Pizarro and the conquest of Peru (in the book only 15 pages out of 450) and nothing at all to his chapters on China and Polynesia.Yes, I know that I was expecting too much and it was great to see such important ideas about "a short history of everybody for the last 300 years" (his subtitle) popularised via television. But by the end I felt that it could have been so much better.

Omid "Jared Diamond made a point in the first episode that other peoples of the world didn't have animals to domesticate but Europeans did, and that accounts for why we were able to make steel and invent complex machines". --- It is obvious that the person who wrote this comment hasn't understood the reasoning behind this documentary or the original book. Please don't ruin this great piece by your simple mindedness. The reasons are far more complex than the single thing you mentioned. Please read the book as is it a great source of information. I enjoyed it a lot. This book is even a taught as a text book at some universities.

Brian Bagnall Jared Diamond made a point in the first episode that other peoples of the world didn't have animals to domesticate but Europeans did, and that accounts for why we were able to make steel and invent complex machines.But then in the third episode he says that when the Europeans in South Africa got too far north they ran into Zulu people and other tribes that *herded cattle and planted crops*. So what explains their lack of technological, economic, and artistic achievement if they had the key things the author claims are needed for success?Diamond also claims germs in the form of smallpox (brought to North America by black slaves) were our biggest weapon. Well, if 150 Europeans can defeat 20,000 native warriors and 400 non-military South Africans can defeat 10,000 Zulus *without a single casualty* in either case, then I think you have to conclude that germs are irrelevant. With or without germs, we were going to succeed.He says Malaria stopped Europeans from colonizing further North, killing "thousands" of Europeans while not affecting Africans. (I'd like to know real numbers but he doesn't say.) Then at the end he says today Malaria is killing thousands of Africans and that is why they can't catch up with us. So which is it, Jared? Did Malaria help the Africans by halting Eurpeans or hurt them? And how come Europe did okay despite massive plagues throughout our history? He also seems far too eager to say that the reasons Europeans succeeded was because of dumb luck. At times when the evidence threatens to overwhelm his rickety theories he's reluctant to admit that maybe Europeans were successful because they worked for it. It's sad watch this obvious neo-Marxist contort reality to try to prove his point.