★ 3 / 10
Animals standing around . . .
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This is my third time watching a German 3D production directed by Benjamin Eicher and Timo Joh. Mayer. My first was Amazing Ocean 3D (2013), followed by…
This is my third time watching a German 3D production directed by Benjamin Eicher and Timo Joh. Mayer. My first was Amazing Ocean 3D (2013), followed by Faszination Rainforest (2012), and now this one Faszination Afrika (2011). With hindsight - literally, by watching these in reverse order - I can say that these two filmmakers and what I assume is their company NEW KSM represent the nadir of 3D nature documentarians who proliferated in the mid-00's during the peak of the long 3D revival, especially in Germany.
While Amazing Ocean has some excellent 3D visuals, watching this duo's lazy earlier work on dry land in Rainforest and Afrika, you realize that the only reason Ocean is even a modest mprovement is because whomever operated the camera was actually MOVING in the water, creating perspective changes ideal for 3D, along with the fact that the sea life moves around constantly, creating staggering depth throughout the picture. So basically, the currents and the sea life did the filmmakers' work for them!
On Rainforest and Afrika, these guys prove themselves basically incompetent at visuals and storytelling. In both films, they repeatedly just look their camera down at a distance, wait for some native animals to wander by sloooowly, or graze, or look around, and that's IT! The footage is in 3D, but they're generally so far away that nearly all of the depth only begins well 'into' your screen. Plus, the animals do virtually nothing, so it's the kind of footage you could shoot out of a Land Cruiser window on a safari.
In Afrika, the filmmakers intercut repetitive footage of a bushman chatting with his fellow tribesmen and with some unseen visitor, while the narration 'dubs' words over his mouth, making it seem as if he's giving some kind of travelogue about Namibia, when in reality he's doing nothing of the sort. Rainforest similarly has brief, badly shot interludes with a couple of aboriginal women who were likewise 'translated' by the narrator, with his dialogue in no way matching what they were saying. How these guys produced the run of docs that they did with 3D productions is beyond me, though I suspect the German craze for 3D during its heyday allowed even mediocre talents like these to load up with equipment and dump what are essentially home movies onto physical media to make a buck. I'm kinda glad those days are over in Germany, and that most of NEW KSM's output can now be had in the $4 - $6 range via Amazon Marketplace. Sadly, I've picked up too much of their stuff this way because I'm a 3D junkie, so I can only advise against buying their 'land-based' docs, even cheap. Their Amazing Ocean disc, on the other hand, does offer up slicker visuals, and a more energetic cast of sea critters, so it's not bad background noise.
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