Alien Planet

2005

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  • 1
7.2| 0h30m| en| More Info
Released: 14 May 2005 Returning Series
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Official Website: http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/alienplanet/splash.html
Synopsis

Alien Planet is a 94-minute docufiction, originally airing on the Discovery Channel, about two internationally built robot probes searching for alien life on the fictional planet Darwin IV. It was based on the book Expedition, by sci-fi/fantasy artist and writer Wayne Douglas Barlowe, who was also executive producer on the special. It premiered on May 14, 2005. The show uses computer-generated imagery, which is interspersed with interviews from such notables as Stephen Hawking, George Lucas, Michio Kaku and Jack Horner. The show was filmed in Iceland and Mono Lake in California.

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Reviews

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.
Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!
AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
nrice-07604 I'll start with the positives: The CGI that the creatures are made from (as well as the robots and the rest of the backgrounds) is amazing and looks super close-to-life. The array of scientists who intervene every now and then and discuss the previous events that just took place are all very well credited, and all very believable and intelligent people.However, the positives sadly end there. Aside from the creatures, the documentary really has nothing to do with the book. It has very wonky plot structure, and I was quite confused with what was going on at some points. The pacing is also off, as sometimes each scene seems like an eternity. The creatures are next. The creatures' habits, size, etc are all highly warped around. Some examples: .the documentary gets the height wrong. The documentary insists that the Gyrosprinter is about the size of an antelope, whereas the book says it's much larger. While an accurate size estimate isn't included, the creature's tongue alone is around 2 meters long...that's as long as the documentary version's entire body! Meaning that the book gyrosprinter is nearly triple the documentary version's size. .Body shape and habit changes. The Eosapiens' changes really bugged me. In the book they look primitive and savage, yet intelligent and wise. They regard the spaceship before them with an intense curiosity, never once showing any hostility to any of the expedition members. Alien Planet's Eosapiens are the exact opposite-the tiniest intrusion causes them to enter a fit of rage and destroy everything. Also, the Griveback is mentioned to be a filter feeder, sucking up tiny floating creatures, whereas the alien planet version absorbs water through its body to feed trees growing on its back. Ironically, the book version doesn't do anything to support the trees on its back, and they die within a week. .the noises. Sure, they were all cool, but grossly inaccurate. Most of the Darwin IV inhabitants (with the exception of the Bladderhorn) communicate with sonar, inaudible to human or robot ears. Yet every single inhabitant in Alien Planet communicates with some loud, eerie shriek. It sounds cool no doubt, but it's inaccurate.My third problem is the overuse of CGI. Kinda like the star wars prequel trilogy, they didn't make any effort to ue practical effects or props in any way-everything was computer-generated. Don't get me wrong, it all looks very believable, but it just makes the production team seem lazy and not willing to do anything special-which i'm sure they're not. The final nail in the coffin of this documentary is that the narrators and guest scientists treat the events of the documentary like they could really happen, and try to make it believable. Wayne Barlowe's original book was meant to be science fiction, and science fiction only-he never tried to convince people something like that could actually exist. Steven Hawking and others' interventions are all very believable, and all supported by real scientific facts, but when you take those and compare them to the animal they're trying to get you to believe exists, you just laugh and pass it off as stupid. I had the same problem with the documentary of The Future Is Wild. But you know what? There's one thing that's important-they TRIED. They made a conscious effort to make an obscure piece of literature into something bigger. They tried to take something already existing and remake it for a more modern audience. But that just poorly reflects when you look at all the problems with it. There really wasn't a demand for a cinematic version of Expedition, then, and there really isn't one now. It was a fantastic book, but not one you'd expect to be remade into a movie like a bajillion times.So that's my honest review of Alien Planet, a solid five stars. I wish I could rate it higher-I really do. But inconsistencies in the plot, creatures, etc etc etc really weigh it down. Its creators tried-they really did-and it's a shame all their effort formed this.
tankace Alien Planet is a great documentary about life in other planets.It is the adaptation of the scientific theorist Barlowe ,who makes assumption about what life on other planet may look like based of facts that we know. Although it is more that a decade old this TV movie is great and it reminded me When Dinosaurs Roamed America, a documentary about dinosaurs which has been unjustly forgotten by the general public ,like with this gem. The story goes like that, we send a spacecraft to the fictional planet of Darwin IV ,in which there are signs that, maybe life has evolved and there , the reconnaissance robots meet the inhabitants of this weird place. To the creatures, dispute the fact that are literally out of this world, they have some characteristics which are surprisingly similar to the animal with whom we sear Earth. Bonus fact is the cameos by people of science like Steven Hawkings and many more, who explain why the animals we see on screen look like that. In conclusion this Documentary made me want to visit this planet and examine its lifeforms and see with my own eyes how different they are from us and yet still as alive as us. For real if you like aliens and you want to see them be scientifically accurate go want it.
haterofcrap I'm not very much into animated films (In fact, I hated most animated films) or documentaries, but I love anything related with aliens, and that's why I liked this movie so much. This documentary was pretty interesting, from beginning to end. The CGI was pretty impressive, it wasn't so good as the incredible CGI used by James Cameron, but it was pretty good anyway.This was one of the best documentaries that I've seen in the recent years. I wish there were more documentaries like this (Yeah, I know that there are some series made with the same style of this movie, like "Walking with Dinosaurs" or "The Future is Wild", but "Alien Planet" was better than those series)However, it is an awesome movie, with some awesome CGI and about awesome aliens. A combination like that just cannot fail.
s c It seemed very interesting to me upon first glance, previous "documentaries" shown on Discovery had some scientific background...but this one seem to be mostly fictional...The whole time I was watching, I was hoping "so is there actually something factual we discovered that led them to make these surreal creatures? like they found some sort of tracks, or remains, etc(kind of like the shows they did on raptors- they had more proof... or are these just figments of imagination?" I was hoping for a better conclusion than "ooo, there's more possibilities to life in other planets than we first thought"...Watching it was interesting, but the fact that it was based on wild guesses and creations of mind without any actual findings is simply a turn off ... I believe there's extraterrestrial life too, but I didn't need to waste 2 hours to see a "documentary" to convince me, I could've just gone renting a Sci-fi movie if I wanted to be intrigued... The delivery of the story was good, the graphics were fantastic, but the realism, un-realism rather, is a major negative blow to the show...

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