Witness Disaster in Japan

Way too brief, but the footage is amazing and heartbreaking.
We've all seen the footage that aired on TV (as well as many clips on youtube) of this horrible disaster. This DVD encapsulates a lot of that same footage, edited down into much shorter clips. It's all still very powerful, but the whole program only runs 45 minutes (as it appears to have been made for TV) and feels incomplete as it doesn't include a lot of the powerful footage easily available elsewhere. For example, there is only about 20 seconds shown of that amazing helicopter aerial footage of the giant sludge & debris wave moving so fast across the land, engulfing cars, houses, and everything else in its path. Watching those long unedited clips (sometimes over 10 minutes straight) on youtube as cars keep trying to outrun the debris wave that's coming in all directions was horrifying, but there's none of that on this DVD. Not that I really want to see that horror again, but that footage just really gave you more of an idea how a tsunami engulfs such a large area and moving in each...

Missed the point.
NatGeo dropped the ball on this one. It wasn't so much the earthquake as it was the tsunami that caused the devastation. I found videos on Youtube that I hadn't seen before that showed how horrific the tsunami was, and illustrated that it's power would not be denied. Someone should put these together on a DVD. I wouldn't recommend NatGeo's DVD.

Condensed view of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan
The footage included in the DVD had already been shown on TV in the aftermath of the tsunami, but it was still impacting to watch it again. At 45 minutes long, I felt it was too brief and concise. Surely a regular DVD can store at least three hours of footage without much extra expense! Some harrowing parts seen on TV, like the tsunami rushing across the airport all the way to the terminals as the passengers watched from second floors, which was very dramatic, and the sea birds flying inland together with the rusing waves, as if feeding on marine life stirred up from the sea floor, were not included. I would hope to see in the future a DVD with all footage included, not just such a brief selection.

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