PotatoFalcon

This movie should probably have a different title. It does not cover a civil war anywhere near holistically. It does, perhaps, capture war photography in general, at least in terms of how I'd imagine it: a string of self-imposed near-death experiences for questionable output or benefit. The characters have no substantial background or development, so I'm not sure why I kept watching them do their thing. I suppose I thought the best was still coming. I suppose I also paid to rent it. Unfortunately, there is no 'best', though I'm pretty sure the writer/director intended for it to be the final 15 minutes. It was rather anticlimactic. After watching about 12 minutes of the movie, I thought I knew how the entire thing would play out, and I was not wrong. Also, the soundtrack must be called out. It was really hard to watch this movie in part because of how obnoxious it was.

I don't doubt that this is considered awesome, out of some sort of fanaticism or personal obligation, for fans of the games. But, taken in isolation, from a story, character development, acting, and screenplay perspective (etc.), this is actually not very good, or at least certainly not worth its extraordinarily high "8.5" IMDB rating (at the time of this writing), which I think might suggest that most of the reviews come from game fans at the moment. I played one of the games (Fallout 3 for PS3) a long time ago, but did not find it very entertaining. In my opinion, there is no good explanation for the current rating.

This held my attention pretty well. I thought it was a bit overly rhetorical at parts and that the editing of (most of) his interviews with field experts or "buffs" (his term) really zeroed in on whatever sound bits propagated his precise message, otherwise ignoring most of what they might've contributed.

Some of the reviews here state that he offered no "proof" of a prehistoric advanced civilization, and that pyramids, stone temples and such are not "advanced". On the contrary, the point he's trying to argue is that a global cataclysm would've wiped out all traces of any prehistoric advanced people, and that if there are traces, they may exist in places we haven't looked or been willing to look (which he gives examples of). He's arguing that, in fact, the scale of construction endeavors (megaliths, pyramids, subterranean structures), and the astronomical designs/orientations seen in them are advanced enough to suggest a level of knowledge and sophistication that could only have been passed down from earlier humans, thus indicating that they must've been constructed at more of a resource, technology, and population 'reset' than the beginning of human life as we know it. In other words, the primitive hunter-gatherer groups that archaeologists currently believe were the earliest humans couldn't have just up & created these structures, all at around the same time--nor would they have had any reason to unless motivated by stories of fear & suffering from an apocalypse.

He dumps on archaeologists a lot, but seems to offer some reasonable explanations for it: he says they discount theories while refusing to look into them; that they refuse to excavate certain places; that they are not motivated to correct people's understanding of history even as new science proves old science to be incorrect.

I can see that, to be honest. It's not that I know much about archaeology specifically, but it is a field wrapped in academia, which comes with all sorts of funding, political, and bureaucratic issues, all while the people involved are necessarily as passionate about furthering their own careers (and maybe supporting themselves) as they might be about furthering human knowledge. Ideas/projects that get funding are often within the comfort zones of various interconnected institutions, following ever similar paths, expanding on existing ideas, etc. This kind of thing exists all over academia. Look up Drs. Karikó and Weismann re: how long it took to get funding for mRNA vaccine research, for example.

I'm gonna find myself some popcorn and look forward to hearing/reading any archaeology community response to this.