Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie Review

"Coming next: 'People After Life,' History Channel's exciting new series about vampires!"

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 24, 2010

Why doesn’t The History Channel just go for broke and rename itself “The Apocalypse Channel”? Or at the very least the “Oh my God, we’re all going to die horrible deaths channel”? This network, which was once the refuge of stone-faced Roger Mudd quietly discussing the origins of the American Revolution, now increasingly has become a no-holds barred litany of various doomsday scenarios, whether they be couched in History’s incessant “specials” on Nostradamus or, incredibly, more mundane fare like Ice Road Truckers. I’ve taken History’s The Universe to task for this trend, where so many recent episodes focus on our planet’s extinction, but it’s really become endemic of the network as a whole that you almost can’t turn it on anymore without some portentous narrator warning us that death is just around the corner in some way, shape or form.

You Twilight Zone fans may remember the great episode with a curmudgeonly Shelley Berman where the hapless comic was so disgusted with humankind that he wished that everyone were like him. Of course he wakes up the next day to discover not only is everyone like him, they are him—a mass of angry, bitter, unhappy people snarling at each other. Twilight Zone of course danced with several fantasies of being the only, or indeed the last, person left alive on Earth, including the iconic “Time Enough at Last” with Burgess Meredith and his unfortunate pair of glasses. Where these episodes no doubt found their subliminal appeal is in the probably universal longing of all us to just be left alone once in a while, and more generally to have the world run under our imperious rules. History’s Life After People takes this fantasy to its ultimate conclusion and simply removes all of mankind, as if to posit that Mother Nature is the boss, pure and simple. And as that long ago margarine advertisement averred, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Parking should be a lot easier after people.

Life Without People can be oddly entertaining at times as it whips up a CGI-fest of cities crumbling under the weight of 50,000 maintenance free years, but it is one of History’s more perplexingly random entries into the apocalypse wars. There are only so many ways this series can show images of skyscrapers falling, or vegetation creeping over various manmade structures, and so it goes to rather ridiculous extremes at times to craft throughlines for any given episode. Therefore, as summed up below, we get patently odd focal points like food or even God Him- (or Her-) self to try to give the going some cohesion. Even these faltering attempts often go off on weird little tangents that frequently have little or nothing to do with the supposed raison d’etre for that given episode.

This second season of Life After People features 10 episodes spread across two Blu-ray discs:

Disc One

Wrath of God is every atheist’s dream, as various religious icons and structures decay over vast stretches of time. This includes such megaliths as the giant Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro and Dr. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in California.

Toxic Revenge, similarly, might be seen as an environmentalist’s “I told you so” as it documents the horrors that await our planet once Man isn’t around to make sure those pesky spent nuclear fuel rods aren’t kept nice and watered, and various cargo ships full of poison spill over Niagara Falls.

Crypt of Civilization is one of this season’s more interesting outings, as it explores Man’s perhaps odd fascination with time capsules. This episode uses a framing device utilizing what is believed to be the first successful American time capsule, a “crypt of civilization” at Ogolthorpe University, built in the 1930’s.

The Last Supper focuses on what will happen to the planet’s foodstuffs after people have shuffled off this mortal coil. This episode features lots of time lapse photography showing vegetables and meat wilting under the ravages of time and worms.

Home Wrecked Home is one of the better examples of how ridiculous this series can be as it attempts to find new angles on the same old, same old of buildings caving in. Though this episode ostensibly focuses on home environments, we’re privy to watching a wide variety of structures crumble, including the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the iconic Stahl House in Los Angeles.

Disc Two

Holiday Hell does not feature your (or indeed my) family gathering together to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas or Chanukah. Instead, it’s another patently far-fetched episode looking at the post-human fates of such disparate items as turkeys and fireworks.

Waves of Destruction may be more of the same, Life After People-style, as it documents what ravages various water sources will wreak on the planet, but it does contain one fascinating segment on a far north closed Soviet mining town called Pyramiden which is remarkably well preserved due to the frigid Arctic temperatures.

Sky’s the Limit looks at everything from airplanes to satellites, which slowly decay or come crashing down to earth. This episode also features at least a few interesting factoids, including that the tallest structure in the United States is not one of the skyscrapers you might think of, but is in actuality a television broadcast tower in North Dakota.

Depths of Destruction is a sort of converse episode to “Sky’s the Limit,” venturing underground to look at subways, caves and undersea ruins. There’s a neat little sequence on the echo chamber built by Les Paul under the iconic Capitol Records building in Los Angeles.

Take Me to Your Leader looks at various structures which once housed the world’s presidents, premiers and dictators, and what time will do to even the post-apocalyptic playing field.

To cut this series at least a little slack, each episode individually usually has at least one or two interesting segments, somewhat ironically often in the tangential sidebars that are not always well related to the main subject at hand. And as with most of these History Channel offerings, taking a series in small doses instead of watching the whole thing in one or two sittings (as reviewers are wont to do) helps to alleviate the tediousness. Life After People does boast a sort of horrible yet fascinating premise which plucks at our own fears of mortality while never addressing them head on. The series if nothing else stands as a potent antidote for the unbridled ego which seems to be Mankind's stock in trade.

Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Life After People's second season arrives on Blu-ray with an acceptable, if far from stellar, AVC encoded 1080i image in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Part of what hampers the image quality here is the disparity between source elements, which are often grainy with extremely poor contrast and often with noticeable scratches and other damage. On top of this problem, the CGI is borderline at best, usually extremely desaturated and devoid of fine detail. Where the series does a good deal better is in the more contemporary filmed segments, either with talking heads (which are in fact much less on display in Life After People than in a lot of other History outings) and some of the new segments filmed on location, as in the very interesting and sharp looking segment on the Soviet mining town of Pyramiden. Even some of the newer high-def segments suffer from noise and artifacting. What you have here is a mixed bag which unfortunately is weighted down by the spotty source footage and often silly looking CGI. It's certainly OK by television documentary standards, but it's nowhere near excellent, let alone reference, high-def standards.

Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Life After People has stepped up its audio to a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track for this second season, and it's quite good in its rather limited ambitions. What we're greeted with is a resolutely centered narration which is occasionally beefed up with various sound effects, typically some good, rumbling LFE as various structures crumble and succumb to the forces of gravity. There are some decent ambient noises added to various CGI elements as well, with bird chirps a frequent add-on. There's nothing overtly amazing about this soundtrack, but it's crisp, clean and clear and gets the job done in a professional manner. A surround track would have helped the many destructive segments have a lot more oomph.

Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are featured on either of the two BD's in this set.

Life After People: The Complete Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Life After People is a typical History Channel death-a-thon, with an intriguing premise that has perhaps already outlived its usefulness. Probably more enjoyable in small doses, watching this series all at once becomes an exercise in apocalyptic tedium, with diminishing returns despite the fun of seeing iconic structures like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Met Life Building come crashing down in ruins. Kids will probably get more of a consistent kick out of this show than most adults, so it could come in handy as a digital babysitter if you parents need a little alone time to ponder your own mortality.