IMDb meta-data is ten episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 229 viewers.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Addictive.
Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank set off on a five-month journey around the world to bring to viewers’ attention eighty treasures that define epochs, cultures, and civilisations. Singularly and collectively they represent instances of the highest achievements of our species. The itinerary went through thirty-four countries on all of the inhabited continents, considering about 400 objects for inclusion in the top 80. They ranged from massive buildings to vast irrigation schemes to buildings to intricate carved miniatures to manufactured goods to symbolic gestures to practical engineering.
The choices are in some cases, obvious, like the Taj Mahal, and others at the end of a long bow, like the Colt-45. But each of the candidates is interesting and the research, explanation, photography, and travelogue to put them into context are engrossing. There is no doubt that each of the candidates are themselves treasures, but, perhaps as a boy, inspired by Jules Verne, Cruickshank limited himself to eighty. The time constraints, the budget constraints, viewers’ attention spans, the limitation to eighty, combine to produce focus and discipline.
Other among the eighty are the Incan Salt Pans, Nazca Lines, Monticello, St James Church, Kakadu Rock Art, Ankor Wat, samurai sword, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Giant Buddha, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Lalibela, Samarkand tiles, Petra, Dogon Mask, Tuankhamun’s death mask, Hagia Sophia, VW Beetle, Guernica, and more. As the list indicates, many are religious in one way or another. The Wikipedia entry lists them, and the DVDs are still available.
At fifty-six years of age, Cruikshank is intrepid, abseiling up rock faces, descending in a crouch for hundreds of meters down damp, slippery, and poorly lite shafts, ascending rocky scree for hundreds of metres in the Sahara heat to reach a treasure. Of course the unseen and unacknowledged camera operator and sound engineer always go first. Always Dan has a notebook in hand to record the details, always sports a neck bandana, and always whispers.
Like many others I find the whispering annoying when it is not done out of consideration of the environment. To whisper while observing a religious ritual is appropriate, but not when standing in an isolated locale talking about rock art. But whisper often he does, reminding me an Australian celebrity academic who always whispered, a technique to make the audience to lean forward and listen to his priceless banalities. I had the misfortune a few times to share a conference panel with this poseur.
At times, Cruikshank seems to go off script with visits to local bazaars and haggling over the price of hat or a meal. More exposition of the candidates and less beating down the locals in price would have been better.
We watched these in 2009 and reviewed them again recently.
The pompous, opinionated, and ignorant troll criticisms on IMDb attack his clothes, his accent, his inflection, his explanations, his choices, his hat, the bandana, the whole project and in some cases all of the above and more. Armchair trolls indeed.