How To Tell A Good Documentary From A Bad One

We've all seen documentaries at some point or another.  They are all over movies, television, and the internet, and they cover everything from dinosaurs to Operation Desert Storm.  Some are less than half and hour in length while others can go on for two hours.  And often they are part of a long series with a particular theme, like disasters, mummies, scandals, etc..  I have watched numerous documentaries over the course of twenty three years and have recently started to learn how to tell the difference between a good documentary and a bad one.  Now this can be tricky, so the way to vet your sources is to actively research the topic on your own.

How can you tell a good documentary from a bad one?  Well, here are a few things to look for.
     
1) How is the language being used?  Are the people being precise?  Are they repeating themselves?  Are they going out their way to be dramatic?  Being precise is very important because you want the audience to understand what you are saying.  No one is going to understand you if you are being vague and unclear with what you are trying to get across.  And persistent repetition is a sure sign that you are just trying to fill in the spaces and hoping that if you repeat yourself over and over again, people will believe what you are saying.  It is very tempting to be dramatic in order to hold the audience's attention, but many of these topics are dramatic already, so trying to make them even more so is Coals to Newcastle. 

2) How are the makers supporting their claims?  What evidence are they using to back up their arguments?  And are they exploring other possibilities in case they are wrong?  Sometimes the evidence being examined is good, but sometimes it is less than insufficient.     
       For example, a story that sounds juicy might have some good insight into a situation, but then again it could be the exception rather than the rule.  You may decide you want to use it to support your claim, but the use of juicy stories when doing documentaries is dubious at best and dishonest at worst.  And there may be other possible reasons for something, so give some time to those possibilities as well.  Biased sampling tends to skew results.
        
3) How is the documentary presented?  Be mindful of the use of visuals.  There are two ways to do this.  One is to use either Live Actors or CGI, the other is to use pictures, artifacts, and location shots.  Let's look at these two methods.
          Using live actors and/or Computer Generated Imagery isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it is all too easy for them to upstage everything else.  A good director knows how to use live actors and CGI to illustrate the point and not overpower the audience's retinas. 
        Live actors have been used in documentaries for years.  There are some advantages to this.  Being able to present a historical event with real people acting out the parts can make history look more alive and real.  And it means that someone can get into another person's mind in order to try to understand them.  However, one problem with this method is that the audience just sees one person's interpretation of a historical person, and so that's the one that sticks with them, which could skew someone's perception of history.  Also, people tend to cast actors whose are photogenic, so the audience may not realize that King Tutankhamen was actually club-footed and had an overbite.  
       CGI has its uses as well.  Aside from bringing dinosaurs, mammoths, and other prehistoric creatures back to life, it has been used in live-action documentaries when working with such things historic volcanic eruptions and major battles.  It can digitally restore ruined buildings and illustrate the incredible world of microorganisms.  All in all, CGI has been a great tool for demonstration in documentaries.  That being said, CGI has to be used very carefully.  Spectacular special effects can distract very easily from the main point, resulting in a visual feast that doesn't really serve any purpose.  
  
The second option involves panning the camera over photographs, paintings, statues, etc. if live footage cannot be used*.  Often music and sound effects will be used to help evoke particular scene. This particular style is known as the Ken Burns effect, named after a filmmaker who made much use of this technique is his documentaries.  
    The advantages to using static images is that is much less expensive than hiring actors and spending money on complex animation programs.  You can evoke the scene just by panning over a lithograph of the Battle of Antietam and adding in prerecording sound effects of gunshots and cannon fire.  And it also means that typically you'll be looking at a picture from that era rather than animation where you'd just be making up the scene.  
    The disadvantages of just panning over static images is that it doesn't represent fully what you're trying to accomplish.  A painting of Colonel Chamberlain's Charge at Little Round Top may look lifelike, but it cannot accomplish the same thing that a group of Civil War reenactors can.  And unlike photographs which are taken with cameras at the scene, paintings, lithographs, and engravings are more likely to be stylized, and thus not fully representative of the event.  

 4) What sources are being used?  This is absolutely critical.  People who are active in science, history, etc., will know the ins and outs of the subject matter.  They will ask questions and seek the answers to them, and usually they will find them even if it isn't the answer they may have originally had in mind.  For example, an archeologist trying to understand how the people of Herculaneum lived before the 79 A.D. eruption of Mt. Vesuvius might examine the contents of the sewer in order to ascertain the diet of the average person.  Further information can be obtained be chemical analysis of the bones found in the boathouses.  And the resulting information gives not just the archeologist but the audience watching the documentary a new insight into the lives of a group of people who lived 2,000 years ago.   
      The danger in this case is putting the emphasis on speculation and mystery.  While mystery may be part of the appeal of dinosaurs, most of us actually want to solve the mystery and see how these creatures really lived.  As C.S. Lewis once said, "Inquiry was made for truth,".  And we ask questions because we want to know the answers even if we cannot fully know them because the dinosaurs all died 65 million years before humans came along.  If the people making the documentary go out of their way to be all about speculation without any real answers, then they have not done anything to benefit the audience. 
       And then there are speculative documentaries about things like aliens, ghosts, and that sort of claptrap.  Neither of those things are real and while it's fun to write all sorts of amazing stories about them, it's a waste of time trying to figure out if they even exist.  So don't even bother with that sort of thing.   

I myself do not claim to be an expert on history and science, but I do love learning about both, and I want to know that when I'm watching a documentary that the people who made tried to teach me something.  I once had to sit through a very biased documentary on the American Justice System, and I tried to watch one that spent ten minutes saying how bad the devastation of Carthage was.  I like documentaries that teach me something new as the one on Life and Death in Herculaneum did.  

Of course even the best documentaries cannot compare with books. 


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*Thank you Wikipedia.  

Updated 3-6-17 at 6:14 pm.