Sexual Astrology - DVD : The Dark Ages (The History Channel )

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Rating: - Informative and Dynamic Enough to Maintain Interest
This production is a thumbnail sketch (1.5 hours) of the Dark Ages, from the fall of Rome to about 1,000 AD. Overall, I enjoyed it and found it informative. This DVD follows a typical History Channel pattern of breaking up history into meaningful segments and illustrating broad social changes by focusing on specific events and individuals for illustration.

I have one minor production complaint: Artistically, I thought that most of the re-enactments and computer-generated animations were fair. Scenes featuring groups of people (notably armies) often seemed to be filmed from angles which would hide the fact that a small number of actors were involved. Sadly for documentary producers, Hollywood has recently raised the bar on this sort of thing with big-budget productions like "Gladiator". Transition graphics and narration are dramatic and slick, though I wish the maps were more precise and less artistic.

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Rating: - educational viewpoint
As a high-school teacher for history and English foundations, I must utilize movies as a visual aide supplement to help them connect with the characters, setting, dialogue... I strongly recommend using this dvd to support your curriculum to teach on all levels of student learning (auditory, kinesthetic, visual).

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Rating: - Fun and informative.
Im a netflix girl so I rented this twice because I love history and documentaries so there you go.

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Rating: - Great video!
A good way to learn what happened during the dark ages. Has some personal stories to make it feel more "human." Gives an overall idea of what took place without being too "dry." Great for learning about this subject for the first time to give you a overview.

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Rating: - Superficially Skims the Surface of History
This isn't one of the best of History Channel's documentaries for good reason -- it wasn't a well documented period in world history. Consequently, the series seemed superficial at best and didn't convince me that it accurately portrayed this time period. It seemed to have a limited budget and was a half baked effort. Perhaps the depressing theme made it less than palatable for the production team. Perhaps it was already known most people wouldn't bother to watch it for more than a few minutes because it was a boring expose of a dark period in human history.

There did seem to be a responsible toning down of the twisted dark things of that period as far as torture for fear of sensationalizing these aspects. However, I must say this series was extremely boring and made me want to pick up a book of history rather than watch this drab documentary. It seemed to blame the entire Dark Ages on the fall of the Roman Empire and completely overlooked the harm fanatical religion caused.