Future Weapons on the other hand, hosted by Richard Machowicz, an ex-marine who looks more like a programmed machine from Universal Soldier and presents with absolutely no imagination in script or comments about the weapons.
What’s hot? Man Vs Wild is a must watch for those who love being out in the wild, battling it out with the forces of nature. There is also a lot to learn from the way Grylls improvises simple available objects from the environment around to ensure his survival. In the Utah desert, there is a particularly interesting scene when he makes a straw out of the stalk of a desert plant, to sip water from rock spring trickle which he dams using the mud around. A fatigued Grylls, eats one of the raw with the shell while scrambling the other one on a flat stone that has been baking under the desert sun.
What’s not? Grylls’ feats are not entirely believable and upon a closer look it is clear that some of them are staged. He received some flak for this, causing TV 4 suspend his show temporarily. Future Weapons is a bit disturbing in the way it showcases its weapons in a stylised format. It uses archival footage of police failures at hostage situations and the like to fight its case for an arms build-up, tapping into the legendary American propaganda tool of paranoia. When We Left Earth is pretty drab in its packaging, using a tried and tested format of interviews, old footage and monotonous voiceover.
... contd.