User Reviews

I watched it when it first aired and It was really interesting and fairly awesome. I think the entire thing kind of reinforces my not being religious. I mean 10,000 years after we all die all of our buildings fall down, all of our paper rots away, and the entire place is all grass again. Plus, from the documentary, if you took the entire history of planet Earth and made it into a 24 hour day humans would only make up 30 seconds of that day. Our entire human existence is 30 seconds out of a full 24 hour day yet the world is here for us and made for us? Please.

We're just not that special or important. Probably the creatures with the highest intelligence that will ever walk the face of the planet but that's about it. The world wasn't designed for us, we're just here.

This is a decent documentary movie describif what could have happened if all people were gone. The idea is not new, truly so, but this is a very exciting and really chilling sensatio to see what will happen after. The film is okay, pacing is good, and the commentaries are useful, but then, there sre two serious drawbacks which hamper and hinder the whole thing - first, rather poorly executed and naive CGI that make it look childish and rather...well...funny, and second, the ending section seems to be rushed and thus a bit bland, as we expected more and deeper and better. All in all, a nice try, full of great inights into chiiling reality of men gone off.

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.

This documentary really puts things into perspective by showing a fascinating scenario in which humans disappear. It goes through the timeline of how our ephemeral civilisation crumbles away one piece at a time. It wasn't quite as dramatic as its competitor After Us, which contradicts it in the area of nuclear power plants, but it's still interesting.

After Cable TV allowed many kinds of channels driven to all ages and so wide range of entertainments, History, Discovery and Natgeo has been searching for most craziest matters ever had imagined, then appears a offbeat subject to fill the program schedule, this first episode around 90 minutes was base from an upcoming series, this interesting subject deserves to think about it, how would be the world if all mankind disappeared somehow, it's doesn't matter at all, but about the Cities, the buildings, the bridges, the subways, anyway all over the world, straight up l suppose apart how bizarre it could be, this is true and exciting possibility to discuss even if it faces as rarely possible to happen in near future, indeed a valuable Doc!!

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First watch: 2016 / How many: 2 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8.5

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.

Impressive visuals, but this is as much science fiction as science fact - the level of speculation that goes on mars it. It routinely ignores non-degradable garbage and nuclear waste in its prognostication, there are huge leaps in logic - for instance, involving zoo animals. They present the only issue as whether they can get out of the zoos, not if they can actually survive the wild, they will actually mate, if there is enough diversity to even create a gene pool for the species to survive. In essence, this show takes incredibly complicated issues with multiple factors and boils them all down to more simple ones. Plus, they misrepresented an area of Chernobyl in order to make their point! There was something vaguely Republican about the whole thing, the idea that no matter what we do to the Earth, it's okay, because it's going to turn back into a pristine Garden of Eden anyhow! Enjoy this for what it is - a science fiction documentary.

Viruses can only parasitize their host until they kill it. In doing so, they will also kill themselves. However, the Earth is a robust organism; it has recovered from meteorite bombardment, endured several ice ages, and survived five mass extinctions. It will also recover from this, the sixth, caused by a species, which will take with it the wildlife and most of the animals that exist today. This documentary theorizes what would happen if people vaporized out of nowhere. It does not consider the causes that would lead to such an event. When that happens, for several thousand years, it will not look as nice (green and full of life) as it is presented in this series.

This movie was definitely interesting. I loved imagining what places like New York City would look like without people. The images of zoo animals' establishing an ecosystem in deserted cities really makes you think. The one thing that I didn't quite get was how people are going to disappear and all the wildlife still live on unaffected. I know that was not supposed to go into how people vanished but the entire premise was kind of like if we took off in a spaceship or rapture or something. I think that in reality, whatever causes people end our run on earth will affect most of the wildlife also. Regardless, this was a well thought out film that causes us to think of humanity as a very temporary part of earth's history and not the end-all-be-all of the universe.

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?

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.

Life after people is a ripoff of Alan Weisman "World without us" (first of all by using a title structure in three words, but whatever).

The basic thought experiment of Alan Weisman is aimed not so much at looking at how nature would recover after we have left, and how buildings etc deteriorate but in fact analysing to what extent our actions on the environment are permanent.

Life after people (the main program) hardly mentions our use of plastics, our pollution of the planet with PCBs, how permanent nuclear waste will be and focuses on the mild, innocent traces of us that will be erased easily: wood, paper, iron, cement. Overall both the program and the series remain a list of crumbling buildings, repeated over and over again, with the same engineering viewpoint.

The series (which I lazily address with this comment too) do mention this a bit more, along with our impact on fauna (eg bison population), or the recovery of fish population due to our current overfishing. Too little still.

The documentary is reasonably good, padded with special effects that are shown over and over again, and with a shift of focus to American landmarks, which is understandable as it was made for US TV.

The content presents a somewhat idealistic and benign-ized vision of our impact on the planet, which really misses the point of actually addressing what are the harmful things we are doing right now and which our descendants will curse us for.

As it's based on scientific conjecture anyway. Where's history where's there no people to live it? And no I don't believe the monkeys will evolve. Yep, swap this with Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters which deals with histories of sites and lives. History's movers and shakers must be they so desperate to get it's emphasis off WWII they'll leap on anything—and such a stupid pointless anything. I've tried watching and I just can't. It goes over the same progression—One day , month, year....Blah. And it's mostly CGI—make a video game out it please. I'm giving it a 3 for the animal shots that said it could be transplanted to Animal Planet. Please History drop this; make more episodes of "Gangland", much needed new episodes of "Civil War Journal" hey even "Modern Marvels" which though I don't like all that much it provides the background of inventions. If it has to stay on History it should be a series shown on random occasions—weekly doesn't work to for me.

This was a very watchable documentary and will be useful in schools and colleges, though I do think, like the Secret, it was a little too documentary like. sure to be a winner on the cable channels. i thought an angle was missing on how we should end up with life without people and yet other forms of life exist. the bit about Chernobyl and the neighbouring deserted ghost town was riveting and a real insight; if we originated from monkeys and apes, why was this not explained more/ ape life not mentioned at all until towards the end. are we really interested whether cockroaches will survive? We want the film to give us a better understanding of how we are abusing our planet and development of it. Certainly makes me wonder whether space exploration is in vain. Too American-ized again for me, only brief mentions of London Paris and italy. The visual effects are however excellent and should get further rewards for that at least

I would understand if the scenario was for example a pandemic like the medieval black death that killed off 80-90% of the population in some parts of Europe (like northern Norway), but when it's about the entire human race mysteriously just vanishing over night, and whether pets will be able to get out of the house or zoo animals can escape from their cages, it just makes you facepalm. Was this documentary by chance, made by American evangelical christians, who believe in the rapture?