Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie Review

Long ago and not so far away.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 19, 2012

Ancient Aliens, despite sounding ludicrous on its face, has turned out to be one of the more consistently interesting History Channel series, one which took some of the ideas fostered by books like Chariots of the Gods and spun them into a number of fairly compelling, if sometimes rather tangentially related, stories about supposed long ago contact between little green (or grey—more about that later) men and humans. Unfortunately, though, this series, as in so many other History outings, has descended into such purely speculative and often apocalyptic territory that it’s hard to take it very seriously any more, and for some that was a challenge to begin with, even when the series tended to try to be less shocking and more thought provoking. Rather strangely, A & E released Ancient Aliens: The Complete Season 1 , but then neglected to do the same with either the second or third seasons, only relenting a few weeks ago with The Best of Ancient Aliens, a compilation of episodes from the first and (rather peculiarly) one from this latest fourth season. This is a hit and miss enterprise, increasingly on the doom and gloom side of things tipped especially this year toward our putative endgame on December 21, 2012, so if you are going to watch this, you might want to start scheduling it sooner rather than later.

The fourth season contains the following episodes:

The Mayan Conspiracy may not exactly make a cogent case for an actual conspiracy, but it treads some familiar, albeit compelling, territory in trying to ferret out how such a “primitive” society could have had such impressive architectural and engineering feats, not to mention monuments aligned to celestial events and a calendar which accurately predicts shifts in the Earth’s axis every 26,000 years. The episode visits all of the four “cardinal” ancient cities of the Mayan world, looking at various structures and sometimes coming to fairly questionable conclusions about them. The episode also ventures even further back in time to the Olmec era, postulating that the so-called “colossal head” sculptures which were uncovered centuries after they were crafted and then (rather strangely) buried are in fact depictions of ancient aliens. One of the kind of interesting sidebars in this episode may in fact not have a lot to do with aliens, namely the complexity of the Mayan language, which confounded scholars for untold years before a mathematician named Ernst Forstemann was able to crack the code.

The Doomsday Prophecies continues on with the Mayan story, this time focusing on the now infamous “end” of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. What may strike some as at least as interesting, is the rather odd starting date of the Mayan calendar, August 13, 3114 B.C. There’s quite a bit of interesting, if at times repetitive, information imparted in this episode, including a nice segment on the seven pyramid temples around Tikal which mimic the star system of the Pleiades, which the Mayans believed was the center of all fixed stars, and therefore the center of creation itself. Christians’ ears may perk up in another segment which portends the return of a major Mayan God who will supposedly descend from the skies on –yep, you guessed it—December 21, 2012.

The Greys attempts to recolor (pun intended) the oft-repeated image of “Little Green Men”, insisting instead that ancient aliens were in fact grey. As might be expected, this episode has a long and not especially informative segment on the famous Roswell, New Mexico occurrence in 1947, but has a more compelling segment dealing with an 1849 discovery near Mosul, Iraq, in what was once the ancient city of Nineveh. Ancient Sumerian tablets estimated to be some 6,000 years old speak of an ancient God named Anunnaki who supposedly bred with humans. There are also some compelling corollaries between pyramid or temple structures in areas as disparate as Mexico, India and China, all of which were erected to honor sky gods, which of course Ancient Aliens hypothesizes were actually little green —er, grey men.

Aliens and Mega-Disasters. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, “There they go again”. As if the Mayan end of the world prophecy wasn’t enough, History now gives us a laundry list of disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes tsunamis and asteroids, all of which in this episode aren’t attributed to the whims of Mother Nature, but instead to some nefarious aliens who are out to obliterate humans. Evidently one too many History Channel series has migrated far enough into outer space by this time to make advanced space civilizations question our collective intelligence.

The NASA Connection reestablishes what made Ancient Aliens so interesting in the first place, namely an effort to concentrate on science (if occasionally science merged with mythology). This episode doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot to do with aliens, unless you accept the conceit of humans as aliens on “foreign” objects, as Buzz Aldrin describes himself in his guise as a moon walker. There’s some interesting information here giving some background on Werner von Braun, the infamous German scientist responsible for Germany’s deadly V2 rocket (the first man made object to enter outer space) and who later helped develop America’s space program.

The Mystery of Puma Punku. For my money, this was the overall standout episode of this season, if only because it deals with a fascinating historical phenomenon that is not all that well known by the public at large. Puma Punku is a weird assemblage of megaliths in Bolivia about 45 miles west of La Paz, seemingly deposited at an altitude of over 12,000 feet. Many of these blocks (some of which are shaped like giant H’s) are over 26 feet long and weigh in excess of 100 tons each. While nearby Lake Titicaca may have a certain name recognition, few probably know very much about Tiahuanoco, a once thriving metropolis where a precursor to the Inca once lived. This episode, like many others in this season, features the unintentionally hilarious Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, a hyperbolic individual with an Eraserhead hairdo whose claim to fame is publishing Legendary Times magazine.

Aliens and Bigfoot. From the sublime to the ridiculous: this episode really scrapes the bottom of the barrel in its attempts to link an already largely discredited idea with a completely speculative theory involving ancient aliens. There is some interesting info here, almost in spite of the episode’s focus, including the still unexplained set of footprints that Mt. Everest climbers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward found in 1951. My home state of Oregon is also featured with the famous Oregon Caves in the southern part of the state being posited as a secret lair for Sasquatch. One chilling segment deals with a Russian scientist named Ivanov who was attempting to cross breed humans with apes.

The Da Vinci Conspiracy. Agatha Christie fans may know that the famous mystery writer had an unexplained absence which she never wanted to talk about and which later became the focus of the feature film Agatha. Something somewhat similar evidently happened to Leonardo da Vinci, supposedly after he had some kind of mystical encounter in a cave in Northern Italy when he was a teenager. Some theorists posit that da Vinci discovered a time portal, was able to travel to the future, and then returned full of wonderful ideas which later populated such writings as his Codex Arundel, and which helps to account for him coming up with concepts similar to the helicopter, airplane and submarine centuries before they were technologically feasible. Of course, he might have just been a visionary genius.

The Time Travelers investigates one of the most enduringly fascinating ideas that has haunted Mankind for millennia, namely whether or not it’s possible to time travel. We get a brief recap of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity which set the scientific world on its collective ear by refuting Newtonian physics and insisting that space and time were in essence one phenomenon. There’s a really interesting segment on some ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico called Pueblo Bonito, which purports to give a geographical representation of our place in the universe and which, like many other megalithic structures around the world, is able to predict cycles in universal orbits. There’s another interesting piece about the Mahabharata and one of the stories in that holy book which deals with a King who was evidently hoisted into the sky to visit the Gods, and who discovered upon his return that Earth time had spun through centuries instead of mere moments, sounding awfully like current ideas about traveling faster than the speed of light.

Aliens and Dinosaurs. The alien connection in this episode is also rather tangential. Instead, this is actually a fairly interesting exploration of the idea that there may have indeed been a time when dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the Earth, against prevailing scientific wisdom and in fact more in tune with what some Fundamentalists aver (see my review of Dinotasia for some more commentary on this idea). We do of course get an apocalyptic focus as well, this time relating to asteroids which led to the end of the dinosaurs and may lead to the demise of humans as well.

Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ancient Aliens: The Complete Season 4 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of A + E Networks Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is a fair to middling looking high definition presentation that offers decent looking contemporary interview segments and some good location photography interspersed with less stellar looking stock footage that varies greatly in quality. Colors are decently saturated and accurate looking, but there's not any overwhelming sense of fine detail. This season tends to "tart up" the footage with all sorts of post processing, including overly grainy or scratchy looking shots, lots of color grading, and other techniques, all evidently done to add some visual variety.

Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ancient Aliens: The Complete Season 4 features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that offers excellent fidelity and some ubiquitous and aggressive low end. The series is rather sonically busy, as tends to be the History way of doing things, but narration is always very clear and well prioritized in the mix. The many talking heads segments also sound just fine.

Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements included in this two disc set.

Ancient Aliens: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are a couple of standout episodes in this fourth season of Ancient Aliens but unfortunately this series, as so many other History outings, has decided that relentless doom and gloom is the way to attract viewers. This series had a rather unlikely premise for an extended run to begin with, but it seems more obvious than ever that whatever possible information something along these lines could have imparted did so long, long ago.