Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk (2008)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A lot of fun.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I was really looking forward to watching this but it was AWFUL because of two things. 1) The AWFUL music by the Dave Mathews Band. It was a horrible choice for this documentary. The music and the lyrics seriously took away from the documentary. It was too loud and not appropriate. The voices of the band OVERPOWERED the documentary. It was like nails on a chalk board or someone popping gum in your ear. Yes...it was that bad.2) their only needed to be one primary narrator and that should have Ben Robert Redford with some from the I Ian woman and t guy who made it. They guys daughters were a distraction like the music. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!! Good intentions but bad decisions on how to produce it.

This was a very good way to appreciate the wonders of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River without flying out to Arizona. I thought the experience of seeing this on the IMAX screen was a particularly good use of this medium. You really felt as though you were shooting down the Colorado rapids, with the spectacular scenery of the Grand Canyon all around.Some of the comments on this board disparaging the film must have been due to the overt political grand standing the film makers felt compelled to subject their audience to. While the cinematography was outstanding, the political/environmental commentary less so. The film makers seem to make a big deal out of blaming global warming for the drought in the western US, but that attribution seems like a stretch, especially given what happened to the native Indians thousands of years prior (vanished due to drought, long before the combustion engine, let alone Hoover Dam).The sanctimonious environmental preaching aside, this was an excellent movie, well worth checking out at your local IMAX theater.

Save for some very nice white water rafting shots, this movie was a ripoff. Three different narrators preaching in pious and ominous tones saying things that weren't even self-consistent.I went to this movie because I am going to the Grand Canyon next week and wanted to learn more about the park, the flora, fauna, the river, the geology, the anthropology, etc.. Instead, I got a 50 minutes sermon about nonsense like shower head flow restrictors. There was one convservation point that made sense: those using the water for agriculture should pay a reasonable amount for the water which will justify much more efficient irrigation methods.I, as some other reviewers have noted, found the changing narrators confusing also.

I mean really, what can I say? While I won't go so far as to say it was a waste of money, I just felt like it was a 45 minute sermon that was meant to make me feel guilty for existing on earth (and living in the Southern Nevada desert). The film spent the first 10 minutes talking about the lake in Chad and showing graphs and pictures of the two dams that are affecting the Colorado's flow. Nothing positive or beneficial was mentioned about how these dams create power and resources for the thirsty areas of the desert, nor about the jobs the dams have been able to create and sustain. Instead, there was a condemnation of what was done over half a century ago in Nevada and nearly as long in Glen Canyon.What I would have liked to have seen was a film that showed the Grand Canyon in all it's majesty and glory from the very beginning. A nature film should dazzle the senses from the moment it comes on screen. This film instead, has at least 3 different narrators whose voices ominously appear and then disappear throughout the film to the point that you have no idea whose talking at different points. What I would have liked to have seen (or heard) was Robert Redford's voice consistently through the film, introducing each person's voice and then coming on again after that person had spoken. Instead, it was Redford, then Wade Davis' voice, then his daughter's voice, then Bobby Kennedy Jr's voice and then back to Redford, then Bobby Kennedy's daughter and I must not forget that the Indian Woman gets her chance to shine. It might just be me, but I think consistency to the structure of the film is the key to a film like this.A more powerful way to have presented the argument in this film would have been to show the beauty of the nature of the Grand Canyon and the mighty Colorado. It would have been nice to have highlighted a brief history of the developments along the Colorado and then near the end brought to light the plight of the river and what the future could hold. Rather, what ends up happening is a consistent barrage of condemnation toward those who've settled the west from the opening of the film to it's last pathetic attempt to show us how we too, can conserve the earth's resources.