Land of the Mammoth (2001)
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Emmanuel Mairesse
Written by Adrienne Ciuffo
Narrated by Avery Brooks

Features:

• Trailer
  
• Behind-the-scenes Shorts
  
• Photo Gallery
  
• Return to the Tundra
  

Anamorphic: No.

My Advice: Avoid It.

This program is ostensibly a sequel to Raising the Mammoth. Fifty words or less: Bernard Buigues and a team of experts who don't mind the cold went to Siberia to dig a mammoth out of the ice. After many trials and tribulations, they found one, dug it up and carted it to the nearest town and stored it in an ice cave for safekeeping. Damn, okay, fifty-one words. Now comes the fun part--which is more fun probably because you're not having to deal with, you know, dragging several tons of frozen mammoth carcass around. It's nice and stationary. They want to, very methodically and carefully, strip away the layers of ice and learn as much as possible about these big, hairy animals and the world they lived in.

There are a few problems with this Discovery Channel special. First thing is, all the problems I had with its predecessor are here compounded. They're constantly making wild leaps of assumption that make no sense: talking about how the mammoth died, for example. They have no idea how this thing bought the big cheese enchilada, so giving us a CGI-animated re-enactment of it--while adding insult to inanity in the form of assigning speculated emotions to the mammoths involved--is laughably ridiculous. And so simply avoided too: all they had to do is say, "Well, we have no idea how the Jarkov Mammoth started his celestial dirt nap, or in this case: ice nap, but one possible scenario is..." No, it's all treated as though they have figured all of this out.

Also a tremendous point-suck for this program is the fact that they are literally picking up where the first program left over. And, well, they've learned practically nothing new since then. In rushing to create a sequel to what I remember being an extremely popular show for Discovery at the time, they haven't given enough time for anything interesting to happen. Instead, what we get is lots of footage of the scientists melting ice with hair dryers, lots of errant philosophy about what it means to be this close to a large animal--anything they can try to hype up into some sense of drama. But there isn't anything. If they had waited a couple of years for some more testing to get done, to where we, I don't know, actually discovered something interesting...then you would have had a friend to talk to.

You get no help from the DVD itself. The behind-the-scenes portion of the disc is separated into four section: In the Field, Recording the Score, The Magic Behind the Mammoth, and Ice Cave. Field comprises a whole truckload of raw footage with little bits from director Mairesse every so often, but not often enough to stave off boredom from setting in, considering the damn thing runs for eighteen minutes. Recording discusses the orchestral recording and runs about five minutes but again, despite composer Richard Fiocca coming on screen and talking about some stuff that might be interesting in the recording/scoring process, most of that five minutes is just footage of the orchestra playing. MTV like jumpcuts and quick zooms on individual instruments cannot save it. Magic and Cave are just bits that would play on the Discovery Channel between shows. Why they couldn't have taken all of this mess of footage and edited it down to a tight, concise ten minute featurette, I have no idea. Then it would have actually been worthwhile. The information you want to know is there, just buried without an editor to coax it out.

Return to the Tundra is a series of journal entries that appear as text-on-screen and you simply advance through them. They were written by Dirk Hoogstra, and maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but I have no idea who this man is. And the fact that there's no introduction or explanation about who he is when you start this feature makes me want to spend time on it even less. The photo gallery included on the disc only has about twenty or so snaps in it, and it's not terribly interesting.

Even a hardcore mammoth fan would have trouble justifying this disc for his or her collection. For the rest of us, I say we should just skip it.