Yellowjackets

It’s not nice. It was the first time I’d seen a Burns documentary. Since then I’ve watched several. We watched the ones about the American West and The American Civil War before we had a holiday in America. The Donner Party were settlers who mistakenly took a route through the Sierra Nevada in winter and got stuck in the snow. They survived by cannibalism; not the first time or the last that it has happened in history (especially with shipwrecks). The way the Burns brothers make documentaries just using still photographs and letters is amazing. Having never seen one before I was mesmerised by it, gruesome as it was.

I have just watched the first episode of Yellowjackets and really wish I hadn’t. I certainly don’t recommend it now. Confusing and full of unnecessary bad language . It jumped backwards and forwards in time and there wasn’t a single endearing character. Totally lacking in depth and I found nothing of any merit in it at all . I will certainly delete the second episode. If ITV considers this as an answer to Lord of the Flies they are sadly mistaken.

I have never heard of The Donner Party. I shall have to look it up.

I watched episode one of Lord of the Flies but with Small Prophets putting me in such a happy place I need to finish watching it when I feel emotionally up to it ( maybe when we get a bit of sunshine again). I’ve just Wikipedia’d Yellowjackets and it said it was partly based on The Donner Party. I watched the Ric Burns documentary about the Donner Party many years ago and it worried me how fascinated I was by it. Thankfully a review in The Observer the next day said that the programme was hypnotic so I didn’t feel quite so bad about it. It said Yellowjackets explored what happened to the survivors in later life. With the Donner Party no one mentioned what had happened to them. The Life of Pie explores the same subject, as did The Terror. I’ll definitely give it a go when I feel up to watching something heavy.

I watched it for twenty minutes. The bit with the broken leg was ridiculous. Not for me at all.