Just watched the much-advertised National Geographic special "Drain the Oceans." (Thank goodness my father recorded it, so we could fast forward through the endless adverts, including at least six iterations of an ad for an upcoming program about a nasty invasive fish.) It was a disappointment, but it needn't have been. The material - the topography and history of the sea floors - is utterly fascinating, and the premise (what would we see if we could drain the oceans bit by bit?) catchy. They had enough stunning footage, some of it CGI-generated, to fill an hour, and a soundtrack of portentous grandiose pseudo classical music (Vivaldi to Dvorak). But the program was 2 hours! And even without repeated reuse of images and periodic inundation by advertisement, the program would have been unsatisfying, because it seems to have been written for sixth graders. We kept hearing about "scientists" using "the latest technology" to plumb depths that were "very deep" or try to understand undersea mountains that were "very high," the whole deal "vaster than can be imagined." At no point were we told about the core of the earth or about plate tectonics or even (perhaps they're not strong enough to matter) about ocean currents. Numbers were used infrequently. In their place came analogies with places on land - the Grand Canyon (comparable in size to the canyon off Monterrey but not in its origin), the skyline of Miami (comparable to the heights of coral-generated limestone hills), the flatness of Kansas (comparable to the abyssal plain) - each of which was made with a minute's stock footage, whose purpose seemed either to reassure us with the familiar or to fill time. Bottom line: this was a travel program, not a science program: its climax was the awkward placement of assorted scientists into computer-generated landscapes (water was gone, but familiar clouds miraculously remained) and the arrival at the apparently deepest point in the oceans, at which the program simply ended. Scaled the inverted peak! Next?
Monday, August 10, 2009
Draining
Just watched the much-advertised National Geographic special "Drain the Oceans." (Thank goodness my father recorded it, so we could fast forward through the endless adverts, including at least six iterations of an ad for an upcoming program about a nasty invasive fish.) It was a disappointment, but it needn't have been. The material - the topography and history of the sea floors - is utterly fascinating, and the premise (what would we see if we could drain the oceans bit by bit?) catchy. They had enough stunning footage, some of it CGI-generated, to fill an hour, and a soundtrack of portentous grandiose pseudo classical music (Vivaldi to Dvorak). But the program was 2 hours! And even without repeated reuse of images and periodic inundation by advertisement, the program would have been unsatisfying, because it seems to have been written for sixth graders. We kept hearing about "scientists" using "the latest technology" to plumb depths that were "very deep" or try to understand undersea mountains that were "very high," the whole deal "vaster than can be imagined." At no point were we told about the core of the earth or about plate tectonics or even (perhaps they're not strong enough to matter) about ocean currents. Numbers were used infrequently. In their place came analogies with places on land - the Grand Canyon (comparable in size to the canyon off Monterrey but not in its origin), the skyline of Miami (comparable to the heights of coral-generated limestone hills), the flatness of Kansas (comparable to the abyssal plain) - each of which was made with a minute's stock footage, whose purpose seemed either to reassure us with the familiar or to fill time. Bottom line: this was a travel program, not a science program: its climax was the awkward placement of assorted scientists into computer-generated landscapes (water was gone, but familiar clouds miraculously remained) and the arrival at the apparently deepest point in the oceans, at which the program simply ended. Scaled the inverted peak! Next?
