Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie Review

Welcome to southern Utah--please set your watches back 10,000 years.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 30, 2010

It was either Johnny Carson or Dick Cavett who once joked in a monologue about landing at Utah’s biggest airport and hearing the stewardess come over the public address system to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve arrived in Salt Lake City. Please set your watches back to 1958.” I was born and grew up for the first few years of my life in Utah, left for a while for a sojourn with my parents in Seattle, and then returned after my father’s retirement to attend high school and college in Salt Lake City. My family was not part of the ruling elite (read Mormons), but my father’s prominence gave us a certain insulation from some of the cultural prejudices that, in those days at least, colored a lot of social interactions. For over 40 years, my father, a U.S. Army General, was Senior Officer at Salt Lake City’s stunning historic Fort Douglas, and in fact the Military Museum he founded there is housed in a building named after him. My parents, typical salt of the earth military types, both smoked and drank, but still managed to forge a lifelong love affair with Utah (and its Mormon ruling elite), which my father had first visited in the late 1930’s, when he was stationed at Fort Douglas with the 38th Infantry. He specifically asked to be sent there again after World War II, and the fact that my parents chose to live out their golden years together in a land far removed from the rest of their family, both nuclear and their own siblings, proves what an ineluctable attraction the region holds. And as much as I’ve joked for years over Utah’s rather odd cultural predilections, I have never for a moment decried the natural beauty I was privileged to grow up in and around, a beauty that was probably a large part of the allure which attracted my parents.

The unusual topography of Canyonlands.

While Salt Lake City is surrounded by teeming mountains, and has, in a sort of mini-Los Angeles approach, rescued itself from its own desert heritage, southern Utah is a wilderness of a completely other, almost alien, type, as any lover of John Ford westerns can attest. The triple threat of Zion, Bryce and Canyonlands offer a fascinating glimpse into an almost prehistoric past, with odd rock formations, seemingly barren desert landscapes (which actually harbor a wealth of life forms), and two impressively robust rivers, the Colorado and the Green. National Geographic’s examination of Canyonlands is a stunning testament to the enduring beauty and mystery of this region, one which blends the mystical with a rock solid reality in often unexpected ways.

Canyonlands follows the explorations of people like photographer Elizabeth Pratt, who shoots various locales from a rubber raft making its way down the Colorado, and geologist Karl Mueller, who gets up close and personal with such intriguing artifacts as Upheaval Dome. This dome, actually visible from space, is an enduring mystery as no one is quite sure what created it. It could be an impact crater left from a gigantic asteroid smashing into the planet, or it could be the remnants of protruding salt deposits, which oozed up through the earth’s crust like errant toothpaste, and then were washed away over eons by rain. This particular analysis contains some wonderfully illustrative images, as the folds of rock and displacement of different strata due to earthquakes are “corrected” via computer graphics to show what happened to various formations. It makes for an unusually compelling and educational look into geologic history.

Some of the most fascinating footage in this episode deals with the pre-Pueblo Indians known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi cliff dwellings are among the most amazing places you can visit in the American Southwest, and I highly recommend you do so if you haven’t already. Carved into sheer cliffs seemingly by will alone, and divorced from any physical reality like gravity, these amazing structures often are completely hidden from sight at ground level. We get some wonderful footage of a couple of these encampments, one of which has only been visited once in the last 15 years. Rock art of the Anasazi is also examined, with state of the art spectrograph analyses trying to determine why the pigments they used have lasted so long. Newer encampments of cowboys of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are also visited by archaeologists wanting to catalog the remains of stores left there decades ago.

This is an exceptionally picturesque Nat Geo outing, full of the weird and often even bizarre outcroppings that make southern Utah like something out of a science fiction film. What this wonderful episode also makes clear is that the region is teeming with life, albeit a lot of it hidden from the naked eye. Whether it’s moss that miraculously goes from brown to green with just one spritz of water, or bighorn sheep which are making a comeback after being infected with a virus from their more common wool bearing siblings, Canyonlands offers a fascinatingly diverse ecology which, due to the topography, is remote and at least relatively unaffected by the outside world. (Even that only goes so far, as a brief segment showing the impact even dirt roads have on the life of the region amply proves).

Canyonlands is an informative and scenic trip through a remote and sometimes dangerous region of the lower 48 states. With a great array of both aerial and grounded photography, this is National Geographic at its best, giving both an overview and an up close and personal insight into an area that is literally history in the making.

Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Arriving on Blu-ray with an excellent VC-1 encoded, 1080i image in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, Canyonlands offers a wealth of the ruddy red sandstone colors that populate southern Utah. This is a very brown heavy palette and may therefore make some viewers think they're not getting much visual bang for their buck. Closer examination will reveal a wealth of really sharp detail, with every strand of moss suddenly coming alive under a drop of water clearly visible, and such wildlife as bighorn sheep to lizards caught in all their glory. Depth of field is astounding in the many aerial shots which make up the documentary.

Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Canyonlands offers a sporadically immersive Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that may not offer the rumbling lows of lossless audio, but which manages to give an environmental recreation that's especially effective in the water rafting segments, as surges and splashes fill the surround channels. Otherwise, this is largely a narrated affair, interspersed with on screen interviews, not exactly blockbuster sonic material. The Americana underscore is very well mixed into the proceedings. Canyonlands may not win any aural sound design awards, but it's a solid offering, especially for a television nature documentary.

Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Two very brief and rather lackluster extras are included, both culled from Wild Chronicles, and neither of which are very well related to the main feature. Colorado Mountain Lions runs 7 minutes and the slightly more interesting Yellowstone River runs 6:12.

Canyonlands Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I've been blessed to spend a lot of time in all three of southern Utah's major parks. Canyonlands brought a lot of memories of the strange and mystical vistas found there back home to me in a very visceral way. If you've visited the region, this will be a nice way to remind yourself of the experience. If you've never been, this excellent National Geographic outing can serve as a very able introduction to one of the glories of the American Southwest.