Life After People (2008)

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The first must-see film of the year.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It was in a "scratched" bin at an op-shop, but all three discs played OK. Each of the ten programmes is only 42 minutes, so at one/day, it kept me interested for quite a while.In each episode, I found at least one really interesting item, mostly about abandoned places... a village in Dorset, a whole city in Indiana, a whole (small) island near Japan. And then there was the plants side. I knew a little about the vine Kudzu, and now I know a bit more, and Brazilian ginger too.Yes, the frequent CGI's of pancaking buildings gets a bit tiresome, especially when I know that this will take many decades before it happens, and, as others have pointed out, no one will see it, so who- cares? And only some of the "experts" were interesting. Although made in 2007, there were no shots of the twin towers demise.

Good work but relies so much on the fact that people disappear as they evaporate. Anything that can kill us till the last man shall have some effect on the environment that we live I assume. Even a deadly epidemic can not kill everyone instantly. From my point of view, they should have dwell on the possible causes of our extinction and create scenarios depending on these. If it is climate changes for example, buildings will fall before they rot because of hurricanes or what so ever.Another point is, once a species like human disappears totally from a habitat, a lot of other species must disappear as well. As we are the main predators on the planet, without our existence, it is quite difficult to say what can survive and what can not. They tell the story in a way that nothing but people disappears. They focus so much on trees and plants. If we disappear, the bug population will explode since there will be a lot of corpse to eat. After they are done with us, they can destroy the forests. What I want to say is, we already changed the ecosystem some much. Without us, before a fair balance, another species (may be bugs) that may not be as sane as us (I mean it, we do not destroy totally) may destroy more species in a quite short time period than we did over the history of man.

I'd love to see this show become a major movie. I think it'd be pretty damn cool. like if a group of people somehow (i don't know how- i don't write movies) get stuck in the future, when people have died out. maybe the people have to survive and run into destruction, rabid animals, new, weird animals, natural disasters, storms, etc... i don't know, i think it'd be pretty cool... i'm thinking it could be something kind of similar to "the day after tomorrow" but there'd be no other people around. (and no, i don't mean like "i am legend.) i am legend wasn't too great- i think if they could somehow make this into a movie, they could do a whole lot with it. i mean, if they made it into a TV show, then why not?

You can see this coming a mile away in the TV guide and, even when I watched it hoping for more, it did just what it suggested it would. There are lots of "what if" films out there and some of them are genuinely interesting and informative, however Life After People is not one of them. Instead it goes down the road of so many of them and just focuses on the special effects of the "what if" rather than the substance. This approach makes for a good 30 minute long programme, I'll give you that, but here the idea is stretched out to 90 minutes, with plenty of advert breaks to help you along.The effects are pretty good though; not Hollywood standards by any means but for the minute they are pretty good and reasonably imaginative. It doesn't help to be shown the same shots over and over again though because it does make the viewer realise just how much padding there is throughout. The experts are all on hand to provide justification and explanation but none of them can get passed the problem that it is not that interesting a question in the first place due to its lack of relevance. They all take about how quickly nature will come back in etc but nobody can make it important or interesting beyond the "oh, that's nice" level of interest. I know there is debate about how quickly things would really happen versus what was said in this film but for me the bigger thing to work out is why it manages to make me care so little? Life after People provides effect shots of buildings falling and cities overgrown. As such it is already competing with Hollywood sci-fi's with much bigger budgets to play with. It does an OK job with this but has nowhere near enough to show or talk about to fill even half of the running time and just gets repetitive and dull long before it is over. A shame really, because it would be a better film had the pressure not been on to fill space as much as possible whether the film merited it or not.