So I streamed this documentary via Netflix which had an amazing 96% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.5 stars rank on IMDB and I thought: "Oh this should be rather good, no?"
Um...no.
On both sites mentioned above and Netflix's own review page, post after post spewed nothing but crazy uber-adoration for what they called an absolutely stunning film. They spoke in terms of such Holy Reverence for the director Werner Herzog. It all reminded me of Roger Ebert's over-the-top, creaming-in-his-pants review of Kirosawa's "Ran" in the '80s that my bud Michelle and I would mock endlessly.
A documentary this popular isn't right, right?
The movie starts off like any other documentary. The narrator describes the setting and the focus...a rare filming opportunity of a recently (sometime in the 1990s) discovered cave in southern France which has a number of cave paintings dating back some 25,000 years.
Now I agree this is a great find and the paintings are amazing considering they were drawn by human beings who were in the proto-stages of development of what we'd call early civilization. Neanderthals, mammoths, cave bears and the like walked among them. Fascinating.
But the director makes it out to be like this cave was the greatest discovery of all mankind. He says it's the earliest known cave paintings (not true according to another website) and points to all sorts of "evidence" of a spirituality of the cave people. Hmmm...
The director takes great effort in describing the sacrifices he's had to make in order to film in the cave. He shows that they use cool temperature lights to illuminate the scenery and a small non-professional camera (assumably due to size contraints). They mention that they cannot deviate from the metal, slightly elevated path which has been installed (assumably well before this shoot) lest anything fragile (like rocks? That's all I see...) be destroyed forever. (Makes you wonder how workmen avoided stepping on the cave floor when they first installed the walkway.)
The director suddenly calls for everyone to be quiet and observe a moment of silence. Silence so deep that we could hear our own heartbeats. And the implication here is that he wants the group to somehow imagine themselves mentally reaching out to the spirits of the 25,000 year old ghosts of the cave painters and convey a message of connectivity...for we too are human as you were, oh great ancestors! Oh brother!
The music throughout the film is supposed to evoke a spirital connection to our shared humanity I guess with its lilting violin strains, flute solos and eerie female chorus trilling. Over-the-top dramatic shit with a new age spirituality bent.
This "expert" (expert at what? IDK, maybe bullshit) who's a dead-ringer for Einstein is interviewed by the director in the midst of a vineyard. Talking about the cavemen's weaponry, it sounds like he says that he suspects at some time they used "phasers". "Okay, I will show you how to kill a horse." He attempts to demonstrate but uses the atlatl very poorly. He goes to retrieve the spear but the director/narrator says "Stay there. I suspect that Paleolitic man was better at it than you."
Here towards the end of the film we are "treated" to about 15 minutes of that irritatingly discordant score and what amounts to just a slideshow of the various cave images. Frame after frame fading one into another with the icy lighting purposely moving around to emphasise the contors (it's a 3-D movie and I suppose this looks better in 3-D) and evoke, perhaps, flickering of ancient torchlight.
Now this guy is sniffing the ground saying that he tries to use his sense of smell to detect ancient hidden cave systems since they would be exhasting air through unseen vents. He should know, he's a professional perfumer. Oh man, only in France. Once in the cave, he admits that he can't really smell anything, but he uses his imagination to sense the odor of all the animals like cave bears, lions and even rhinos that had been there.
The director mentions that one could see a footprint of an 8 year old boy and a cave bear paw print next to each other. He wondered if they were friends walking together, or if the cave bear was stalking the boy as prey, or, if the impressions were made a thousand years apart from one another. Noone knows.
In the "Postscript" the film shows nearby albino crocodiles (clearly in a containment area) which have prospered in a false eco-system created by the nuclear-power-plant-generated water outflow heated as it is used to cool the plant's fuel rods. The director wonders what they (the crocs) will make of the paintings in the cave when they eventually reach it.
Ugh!
Give me a more science-based un-biased documentary style like those of PBS or National Geographic Channel. This stuff was way too schlocky for me.