Aliens and Pyramids
Monkey Killers
This films uses a lot of ken's burning of photographs mixed in with different short video clips. The birth of agriculture allowed us to feed large work forces. Religion pushed people to build sculptures and monuments. Saying ancient aliens built the pyramids. This documentary is a series of interviews used to weave back and forth and tell a story about how the pyramids were built by ancient aliens and ancient humans living in Egypt. They also tell the story in a series of chapters cutting up the story and allowing them to switch subjects fairly smoothly. This isn’t just a documentary saying that aliens built the pyramids and it shows both sides of the arguments on how they may have been built. Gives you different options on what to believe. They show evidence of ancient cave paintings and pottery that they say depict ancient aliens with things like telescopes and astronaut helmets on. They show a parallel of how when areas like Peru were first westernized the people there though they were gods and built statues of their planes to try to lure them back. Alien astronaut in a rocket ship in the main tomb of a pyramid.
The documentary that I chose to watch was "Monkey Killers". It is filmed in the rift of Africa which is a place where there is water year round. It is based on the lives and group relations of the baboons that live in the rift. There is a secondary plot in this documentary following a lion pride and how the change in seasons effect them.
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If you know much about Africa you know that there are more or less two seasons, a dry and a wet season. During the dry season the grazing animals leave the rift in search of more grassland but some of the other animals stay year round. These grazers are the main food source for the lions and the other apex predators in the area so when they leave the pickings are slim. Because of this they can be known to go after the Baboons during this dry season. The baboons go to extreme lengths to escape the grasp of these predators during the dry season, so much so that they scale a completely vertical rock wall all the way to the top so that they can sleep in peace. They then have to climb back down in the morning for food and water. This works well during the dry season but once the rains come the rock face becomes too slippery for them to scale and they must remain in reach of the predators.
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Luckily for the baboons the rain also brings back the grazing animals which means the lions look for more filling meals than the baboons and tend to ignore them. This documentary does an amazing job of highlighting the relations between not just baboons but how they work with numerous other species of animals to protect each other from the lions. They have such close relations with some of these animals that they will feed and even sleep together. It's amazing to watch and almost reminds you of a person with a dog at times. This documentary does an extremely good job of pulling you into something that might otherwise be not that interesting. Once I started watching it I knew I wanted to watch the entire thing, and thats why I think that this is a great documentary that anyone can enjoy watching.