SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Micitype Pretty Good

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

indiepoppedhearts-174-356068 Quite a few reviewers are being far too harsh and expecting this to be something else that they watched. This does a good job of answering the question presented in regards to who asked the question, someone from New Guinea. It explains the limiting factors that keep a population from being able to free up enough of their individuals in order to allow them to focus on objectives not to do with getting food. There are more answers to the question if you change who asks it but in pertaining to the people that asked the question it does a good job of covering the basics of some of the bases.Yes, there are scenes of him failing at using some tools. It seemed to me like a demonstration that westernization means nothing to ability and intelligence.I would suggest showing this to just about anyone. While it doesn't cover all of the bases it puts the information it does cover in an easily understandable format and explains factors as simply as possible.

celr This series asks the question: why do Westerners have so much materially and the natives of New Guinea have so little?Jared Diamond's thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel is that because Europeans had geographical conditions which were favorable to farming and domesticating animals they had natural advantages which allowed them to develop a high degree of civilization and conquer the world. I usually enjoy these video documentaries though I know that I'm getting watered-down history with great visuals. But 'Guns, Germs & Steel' is too weak an idea to carry through more than one episode, let alone three. I was willing to buy his notion that access to domesticating animals allowed for more productive farming and therefore greater civilizational advances. But he fails to explain why other civilizations that had those same advantages, for example China, India, the Middle East, didn't develop the science and technology that allowed Europe to dominate the world. The final episode is about Africa and shows that traditional African culture had many of the same advantages that Europeans had: domesticated animals, immunity to common diseases and efficient farming, yet never developed a higher level of technology. He becomes openly emotional about the current poverty of Africans while failing to explain why other cultures, like India and much of Asia, though formerly colonized, have now managed to advance scientifically and socially while much of Africa remains in misery and backwardness.Diamond likes to refer to the "greed" and "aggressiveness" of European colonizing powers, but isn't everybody "greedy?" How did the Incas (which he uses to illustrate his point) gain a huge empire and amass all that treasure? The Incas had 80,000 men under arms, so they weren't exactly a peaceful people. Farther to the north the Aztecs were not just warlike, but bloodthirsty in the extreme. How did they so easily succumb to the relatively few Spanish invaders? Now that is an interesting question which Diamond touches on in passing but then drops for the rest of the series. He seems to be saying that Western success is merely the result of evil impulses like greed and desire to conquer. This fits the politically correct narrative about the 'evil' West and 'innocent' natives. Unfortunately he can't express this idea openly because it's too simplistic and fails to account for reality.The answer to that question is, at least in part, provided by Victor Davis Hanson's book "Carnage and Culture" where he demonstrates how Western armies often won the day when outnumbered by virtue of superior military discipline. By the end of the three part series his thesis dissolves in contradictions and tediously repeated visual images. The first episode is interesting if a bit elementary, the other 2 are depressing and hollow. He fails to explain, or even attempt to explain, how it was that the scientific and industrial revolutions happened in Europe and nowhere else.

Nooshin Navidi As much as I enjoyed this film, my enthusiasm was dampened by the fact that most of Diamond's revelations are ideas that were in circulation as far back as a hundred years ago.I couldn't help but wonder why someone so well-versed in history & anthropology would be triumphant about the "discovery" that Europeans used smallpox to wipe out Native Americans, that guns helped Europeans conquer Africa, or that malaria made it impossible for Europeans to migrate into the center of Africa in large numbers.Furthermore, his explanation ignores the social, economic & political dimensions of world conquest by Europeans, not to mention the ethical & religious implications of past and present conquests and inequalities, chalking it all up to the impersonal forces of luck and "geography".His reaction to witnessing the horrors of disease-ridden African children is startlingly naive, leaving one with the question: Why did Europeans set out to conquer Africa, killing hundreds of millions of people in order to spread out & enrich its economies, rather than do the same thing to China?? The Chinese invented gunpowder and had cannons before Europeans even heard of guns. Furthermore, they had a far greater population, a more advanced technology, & more efficient agriculture.The answer lies in certain structures within European society. Until we figure out what this is and how it still manifests itself in our world, we will never be able to understand why inequality still exists in our world. Nevertheless, Jarred Diamond's optimistic conclusion is sincere. One can see how much he wants a better world.~NN

mmcloughlin Don't know if this contains any spoilers or not, but I don't want to risk being blacklisted until the year 3462.I disagree entirely with the viewer comments that have described *Guns, Germs and Steel* as "politically correct" and "neo-Marxist." They cannot have watched the same series that *I* did.The series *I* watched depicted the history of European colonisation in the Americas and southern Africa with no particular inaccuracies. I saw nothing in the series that portrayed Europeans as bad people who happened to be lucky, though Europeans often *were* lucky - and there's nothing wrong with luck. Neither did I see native peoples portrayed as poor little innocent things. If anything, the Inca was rather arrogant - as you would expect any leader would be when dealing with foreigners, if his country has not been conquered in living memory by any other world power. I certainly saw nothing that could be construed as Marxist or Neo-Marxist, except by the most incredibly elastic of imaginations.Otherwise, many African peoples *do* have a built-in immunity to malaria and other tropical diseases that Europeans lack. At the time they were at the height of their successes, the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilisations *were* as advanced as any other in the world - and as wealthy; sometimes more so. Aboriginal American and Khoi-San populations *were* decimated by smallpox and other diseases introduced by Europeans; just as European colonists were decimated by tropical diseases like malaria. (NOTE: The Khoi-San peoples are completely different from all other sub-Saharan African peoples.) So, I don't see what some of the other commentators are complaining about. The only thing *I* can find to complain about is that the series doesn't tell me anything I did not know by the time I finished seventh grade. There's really nothing new in the way of historical information in this film. It does, however, present some nice dramatisations of events, such as the conquest of the Incas; the production values are very high; and it fills in a few holes here and there that didn't get covered in Mrs. Gruber's Sixth Hour Social Studies Class at Milan Middle School.If you rent or buy this, assuming you had a decent primary and/or secondary school education, you won't learn anything new, but you will have an enjoyable and entertaining time reviewing what you already learned (or should have learned) by the time you hit high school.