TV film/documentary review: Atlantis: End of a World, Birth of a Legend (2011), directed by Tony Mitchell
Was a bit undecided how to classify this one, as IMDb lists it as a TV movie, but at the same time, it’s a documentary … with live action re-enactments of the events. Either way, it’s a one-hour show not about Atlantis. “What?!” I hear you say. “Then why’s it called Atlantis?” Beats me. Fair enough, it concludes by saying (and I paraphrase) “and this inspired Plato to write a morality tale about the lost continent of Atlantis”. That’s about it.
What it’s really about is the volcanic eruption that shattered the island of Thera (now Santorini) back in the day. As a fictionalised drama, with a Serious Man doing the historical facts narration. It’s about a man and a woman, a father who renounced the gods when his wife died, a priestess and a Vision where the woman saw her husband die. The Vision is later interpreted as the husband should be sacrificed to the gods because the gods are not relenting, even after they’ve sacrificed a bull to them. The volcanic eruption, however, goes ahead.
I wasn’t too keen on the peculiar mix of documentary and TV film. It’s okay to have a few bits re-enacted for illustrative purposes, but this was more … narrated for documentary purposes? It was strangely backwards and didn’t really work. It was well made with the imagery of volcanic eruption and everything, but the storyline itself was a bit meh. Would’ve preferred a straight documentary, and not one that by the mere title promised to be about Atlantis and then failed to deliver.
The legends of Atlantis and Lemuria/Mu are subjects of great interest to me, so I was really looking forward to this. But alas.
2 out of 5 Greek islands.
Some believe that Plato had written about Thiera, when he wrote about the island continent of atlantis being swallowed up by the volcano and the sea. The title is accurate. Plato first heard about this story from an Egyptian, it appears, on a search on the internet.
Plato first heard about the volcano destroyed island, which he christened atlantis, from his forefather Solon, who in turn had heard about the story from legends and stories passed down by generations of Egyptians. The island was to the west (and north) of Eqypt. Subsequent research may be accurate, which points to the island hit and destroyed by earthquake, now called Santorini, and previously called Thiera.