They hybridize species and now they also hybridize documentary and fiction.
It takes the docudrama, the miniseries that aspire to combine a more or less ambitious dramatization and the rigor of a documentary.
The penultimate example is
Alexander the Great: The Making of a God,
on Netflix, where we are told about the Macedonian leader who built a great empire and expanded Hellenistic culture in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
But it happens here that when you get into the dramatized part you let yourself go as with any series or movie, and the transition to the interview cuts is not smooth to listen to the comments of those who know, more than pertinent, but they interrupt you.
The series about Alexander focuses on a short period of time: the handful of years in which the conqueror faced the Persian king Darius III.
And thus it is justified that the narrative does not exceed six chapters (they could do another season with his most oriental adventures, which ended badly for him).
The dramatic part does not quite get you into Alejandro's mind, perhaps there is excessive theatricalization, but it is technically and visually successful.
For some, the most controversial thing, we are still like this, has been that The Great is presented as having a homosexual relationship with Hephaestion, which seems quite defensible for historians.
It is praise for the great military strategist of his time, although it is overlooked that he was capable of ruthless cruelty when he saw fit.
The latest in docudramas is bolder.
Prehistory: last secrets,
on Movistar+, is a Franco-Chinese co-production (with the original title
L'Homme de Pékin
)
of only two chapters of 44 and 52 minutes, respectively.
It was directed by Jacques Maleterre, author of other productions on the same theme
(The Odyssey of the Species, Homo sapiens, The Dawn of Man).
This time he has the aspiration of counting 800,000 years!
of human species in Asia based on research on the Peking Man, found almost a century ago and described at the time as the “missing link.”
The first episode focuses on Homo erectus from his learning to conserve fire, that was a revolution;
In the second there are the sapiens who came from Africa and other human lineages, such as the dragon man or the Flores man, and we end with the true discovery of America: the day our ancestors crossed the Bering Strait after a very difficult journey through the ice.
Everything is dramatized from beginning to end, so nothing interrupts those who dive into the fiction.
Financing from China surely allowed the French director to increase the budget in exchange for locating most of the story in what is now his territory;
A certain nationalist purpose is perceived, that of showing the world that theirs is a very ancient civilization.
But that's not so distracting.
All in all, it must have been a great technical challenge, no matter how many digital effects and makeup are used, although in some scenes of extinct species (such as the imposing gigantopithecus ape or the big cat megantereon) the animation behind the beast is noticeable.
Shocking in any case.
Here the paleontologists who have advised do not appear, but rather a voice-over
provides
the context at a good pace.
These prehistoric characters are credible in their characterization, and the director has avoided presenting them as rude savages, even though their first hesitant steps towards socialization are explained.
But, of course, everything happens so quickly that it seems that the same person discovered how to carry the fire and set up a barbecue on the same day, that the advances (the speech, the bonfire, the spear, the art) occur all at once and not during millennia.
The first chapter is the most interesting, because the story of those bipeds who managed to stop being easy prey for predators with their technical skills is less well-known.
Their first rites are recreated: magical thinking, it is clear, comes from far back.
Prejudices
What is told in this series is more Rousseau than Hobbes: the first human communities are portrayed as supportive, egalitarian and free.
There was only motherhood, because they did not understand the cause of pregnancies and, for the men of the clan, all children were everyone's children.
We see women in leadership positions or creating art, something that for centuries we avoided believing because we projected our prejudices from post-agrarian societies.
They were not hostile to the other human races they encountered heading south.
When fiction and documentary hybridize, fiction ends up weighing more.
We know the list with every pharaoh of Egypt and the largest (huge) part of the history of the human species, separated from the tree of evolution about two million years ago, is still shrouded in mystery.
That's why it's fascinating.
This story captures you, but you regret the shortness of the footage, the haste in narrating the transcendental innovations that made us who we are.
It doesn't taste like much, but it's 96 minutes: what did you expect?
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