I didn’t particularly know what to expect from Life After People going into the viewing, but something told me I’d dislike it. I think it had to do with my negative reaction to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, a bestseller in 2007, that seemed to posit that the world would be better off without us and that human beings were making the ecosystem unstable.

I am pleased to say that there is very little human-bashing in this documentary, which mainly utilizes CGI modeling to demonstrate the effects on the world if people were suddenly not there to perform upkeep on things such as buildings, cars and even their pets. It jumps to various points in time after the disappearance of human beings to show these effects and does so quite effectively.

The CGI transitions are not seamless (yet), but they don’t look cartoonish, either. The commentators on the documentary are all experts in their fields and provide good insight into what the world might look like without getting environmentally preachy.

Grade: B

Life After People is currently available.