Queens

Beautiful cinematography, interesting subjects, but good God it was hard to stick with it as every 25 seconds there's another forcibly inserted pop song that tries to amplify the scene, but instead it just takes away from the entire experience. Each episode feels like it has 30 different clips of pop music. If you're used to the quality of a BBC type documentary with well chosen atmospheric music that enhances the scenes, this will feel like fingernails on a chalkboard. I liked the tenor and pacing of Angela Basset's voice, and again - the camera work is top notch. I hope the team behind this production keeps at it - but next time don't try to make it a music video, please.

It's an all female produced, edited, and narrated documentary that spotlights female animals which I can only assume provoked the 1 star reviews. How sad that such an amazing piece of work is overlooked due to sexism. The cinematography is thrilling. Capturing these clips takes extreme talent and experience and we see that here, but what I absolutely loved is the soundtrack and editing. It worked so well with the shots and I have rewatched the end of the hyena episode over and over. I've never had a documentary evoke the emotion this series made me feel. Angela Basset is a force of nature and her narration seals the deal for me.

The main problem of this documentary serial is the narrator, whose voice is way to low, vague and spiritless without energy. Even by increasing the volume, her low tiresome voice still became so difficult to catch sometimes. To tell the stories about the queens in the wild animal kingdoms, you need to use clear, strong and energetic voice to deliver the powerful, sometimes predictable, sometimes not quite predictable situations when those queens of the different species become weak and old and inevitably ousted by the young, upcoming and more vicious ones who come to take over and become the new queens. Yet this weak narrator's voice simply failed to deliver such wild animals' world.

The other weakness of this documentary is the random editing that jumped around. Often when we just got into that specific animal's world, it suddenly cut it short and began to tell another animal's stuff. Besides, all the contents of this documentary are already well-known and old information that we don't really want to renew or relearn. This is a very boring fact finding documentary that we could do without, especially with such terrible choice of a weal, seamless female voice just because the documentary needs to tell, that in animal kingdoms, the female ones usually reign over the males and the other females. Sounds more like a feminist's production, don't you think?

I could only watched the first episode and decided to quit in the middle.

Visually stunning at times and some very cool animals/interactions captured but far too much anthropomorphic language and not enough science of behaviors. Angela Bassett does a great job with the delivery of the dramatic lines and I can't fault her for iffy writing. The music is at times too much "girl boss" and sometimes takes away from the show. Really impressed with the video they managed to capture and what little science was in the show was fascinating but it heavily leaned on big dramatic phrases to explain normal animal behavior that is not "ruthless" or "hungry for power", it's simple animals surviving based on their instincts and needs.

Nat geo guys must be paid well to wait for this much time to make a video worth watching. This documentary was different from the things BBC films (both are fixed on animals anyway). And, the music mix was accurately paced. I guess when the whole world was preparing for coronavirus, you guys took a flight to africa and then the other places with every itinerary already laid out, combined with the approximate or fixed time for the end of the filming which I guess was parallel with the pandemic. There are things which are above my thinking grade. Well, Thanks for the animal kingdom for let them shoot and nat geo.