L'homme a mangé la terre

A rather apologetic yet shocking and spine chilling documentary about earth's exploitation.

I wish it had bigger audience even though it suggests It's too late for anything to be done.

The logical conclusion is that human, or intelligence combined with greed if you like, is doomed to self distruction.

A must see for everyone living on planet earth!

The English narration is a little languid and monotonous but mixed up here with a lot of obvious facts about human civilization are quite a few little gems as footnotes only, like a claim Oppenheimer resisted plans to try the bomb on an uninhabited area of Japan - keen to learn of the deadly effects of the new weapon... it's a sort of thesis that frames human history as all about exploitation of nature and a 'fight' against it. There the linking of industry with war, and then back to industry again and the incentives oil gave to shaping a society to use it, etc.. Electricity it's pointed out was in bed with the US construction industry where deals were made to supply homes, kicking solar power development into the long grass.. There's stuff worth concentrating on if you can. The visuals are something of a collage of mostly incidental archive footage, but the thrust is in the sedated drone that forms the non-stop rhythm of the narration. Perhaps it's a blessing that it's measured vocally rather than erratic & polemical, but by the same token the work doesn't really assert a great deal in the end about perhaps a counter-progress. Being shown how deeply we've been invested into fossil fuels, or wars even for so long rather begs the question as to what else we could have done. Still intelligent and thought-provoking in a sophomoric sort of way.

It's a pity that the tone of this documentary is so insufferably moralising and pessimistic. Besides, many positive facts associated to human progress are intentionally omitted, conveniently presenting a viewpoint that reinforces the authors' thesis, but leaving the spectator ill informed. But this backfires, as the documentary loses in credibility. Additionally, the footage selection is not particularly accurate, introducing scenes of unrelated events (such as a dancing contest). Very French to put the blame on Britain and the US, with very little criticism of the USSR, the Middle East and no mention of modern China. Rather than exploring the root cause of the big problem (and potential solutions), this documentary judges the West to be invariably evil and condemned to destroy itself and the whole world. This formula could be applied to practically anything you can think of if you only present the facts that interest you and make the spectator think that is "the truth". To give the documentary some credit, I must confess that it is engaging from the very beginning, and makes some interesting points, such as the military inventions in origin that are transformed to satisfy civilian needs, and the transfer of power from Europe to the USA. In summary, this documentary, rather than being informative, reminds me of catholic priest preaching against all sins.

Misses most important point of our weakness- greed and money. It starts well but the deeper and deeper goes into wrong assumptions. It's like defining our world without taking in to account the macro scale of our wrong doing. On a micro scale we can see many bad decisions but on a macro there is something wrong with us / the greed, the money, the 1% not wishing to loose control over the world.