Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

darbski Yeah, I agree with most of the previous reviewers. The sad part is that National Geographic should have tons of reference material about the decades preceding Columbus's arrival. If they were going to show what happened AFTER, why not focus more on Gold, Silver, Gems, and any thing else they could have the native populace dig up in slavery? Why not investigate all the religious movements, and their deleterious treatment of the native people? BEFORE, though, was basically left alone. Crass commercialism; like "Drain the (fill in the Blank)". How about the kind of informative, factual presentation we all know they are capable of, rather than the "History Channel Hollywood" version?

walkingatdusk I went into this to try to learn about the cultures and ecology of Pre-Columbian America and instead a large part is about Europe before Columbus's voyage and the latter third of it is about after the colonists got there. Meanwhile, only a handful of the native cultures are talked about and only briefly in a doc that is supposed to be about them, if you are going by the title.On a technical level, the production value is high and well done. Still considering the title, I think the writing is lazy, regurgitating easy to research material, rather than anything that hasn't already been done over a trillion times already.

Movie Watcher This is one of those riveting documentaries that comes along once in a while. The cinematography is beautiful. Using many motion shots over landscapes and forests and computer animation, a useful overview of the conquest of the Americas and the Columbian Exchange is given. Many of the ideas are strongly reminiscent of Jarrod Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.Contrary to the sentiments expressed in the inexplicable and unjustified rant by SanFernandoCurt in his review here, the language is relatively neutral and non-political -- it tells it like it is. There were many things -- good and bad -- that resulted from the Columbian Exchange. There is no hint of "Marxism" or spin in this documentary.There is mention of biological imperialism once in the second episode. I'll admit that the 100 million population estimate is at the high end of the range -- Europe only had 60 million in 1492. But why not? As the documentary states the Americas are a fertile land that was managed by the natives and is 10 times the size of Europe. Diseases like smallpox and influenza probably wiped out 90%+ of the native American population.

SanFernandoCurt Marxism has codified the great crimes of Western civilization in constantly changing terms, to conform to relentlessly evolving cultural history. First, the general term was "colonialism", and when European colonies were no more, and Europe flourished, it changed to "neo-colonialism". That gradually puffed up to "imperialism", which can mean - anything, really. Today it's virtually derogatory terminology for anything American or Northern European."America Before Columbus" spends much of its vastly wasted time prattling something it calls "biological imperialism", which boils down to "European imperialists took the potato and gave nothing back". We evil honkies pollute genetically! In the very germ of plants! Is there no end to our iniquity? The propaganda is hysterically heavy-handed with super-bad stuff like Christianity constantly bashed through unsubtle editing and imagery. In one of many missteps, the program implies Europeans even cursed the new world with pigs, although it pictures the collared peccary, merely pig-like and native ONLY to the Western Hemisphere. And what about the claim that the Americas were filled with urban centers, and had higher population than Europe at the time? This claim is made on zero evidence. What? Were there census-takers in the 15th century? Native Americans lived mostly hunter-gatherer, neolithic lives of grinding hardship - walking for transportation, surviving vagaries of nature. Lifespan in those conditions is 30 years - tops. Yeah... it was one big communal paradise. Hogwash! History of the last 500 years on these two Western continents is nothing less than epic - tragic, triumphant, sad and ridiculous. It needs fair account and appraisal after decades getting festooned with this kind of silly, failed dogma.