Anyone who has seen Hollywood film director Darren Aronofsky’s frankly mad movie, Pi, will know about the fascinating beauty and astonishing, mind-melting complexity of mathematical equations applied to real life.
This new documentary release, directed by Patrice Pooyard from Jacques Grimault’s source novel, adopts a similar theory, albeit with more of a grounding in reality, ultimately emerging as just as preposterous.
Brian Cox (not the scientist/ex D:Ream member, but the gruff-voiced Scottish actor) narrates this self-aggrandising documentary, which purports to have some overall significance for understanding ancient history and the modern world’s destiny.
Cox’s growl adds a certain credibility to anything he chooses to narrate. His voice could lend gravitas to an advert for Mr Muscle, for God’s sake. A decent narrator, then, initially can disguise hokey conjecture as purely scientific analysis, but the illusion cannot last, as is the case here.
Fans of the Indiana Jones films or The Da Vinci Code will lap up this enjoyable fare as Cox and various scientists (voiced in varying degrees of inappropriately heavily Scottish Eurotrash comedy accents) elaborate on an intelligent, if perhaps misguided, theory linking the pyramids of ancient Egypt, the Incas (who built their cities using the same techniques), Easter Island’s moai and China’s largely unrevealed (to the West, at least) pyramids.
Using complex equations involving our old friend and what mathematicians call the ‘golden number’, the idea that sites of significance across the world create a kind of ‘alternative equator’ is linked in with the notorious Mayan calendar and studies of astonishingly skilled architects of the ancient world in an enjoyable, satisfying narrative.
Unfortunately, dodgy mathematics that it’s both difficult for the layperson to understand and easy for the professionals to create any desired conclusion from, coupled with the showy direction from Pooyard, combine to take the edge off a complicated, otherwise accomplished documentary.
A hazy explanation hurried through with an X-Files straight-facedness proves entertaining, but ultimately difficult to take as seriously as it wants to be.
Released on DVD on Monday 22nd August 2011 by Optimum Home Entertainment.