While I found this first documentary of the "Seven Up!" series highly compelling, and think it's worth watching, I have to sound a grave warning for anyone who, like me, intended to start here and watch the entire series.
Yes, this first one is great. I enjoyed how it was shot, how it was produced, I enjoyed the children and funny things they said, I liked the artfulness of it and the 1960's style of it. It made me eager for a follow up, and "7 Plus Seven" was also enjoyable, to see the dramatic changes in the teenage years, and then "21 Up" was interesting as well. But each subsequent documentary contains huge portions of the previous ones, and this quickly becomes a giant bore, particularly when you are not watching them seven years apart. Also I found the people became less interesting over time. They are just normal, mundane people, after all, and yet the documentaries about them just got longer and longer, clocking in at 2 hours or more, when the first one is a snappy 39 minutes. It started to seem like really bad reality TV. And all the artfulness of that first one seemed to be totally drained out over time. I had to stop watching and could not continue.
The really magnificent documentary might be the final one, when all these people have passed on and some kind of grand retrospective of their lives can take place that attempts to draw some conclusions about this grand experiment. So give it a shot if you like, but it was too much for me.
Yes, this first one is great. I enjoyed how it was shot, how it was produced, I enjoyed the children and funny things they said, I liked the artfulness of it and the 1960's style of it. It made me eager for a follow up, and "7 Plus Seven" was also enjoyable, to see the dramatic changes in the teenage years, and then "21 Up" was interesting as well. But each subsequent documentary contains huge portions of the previous ones, and this quickly becomes a giant bore, particularly when you are not watching them seven years apart. Also I found the people became less interesting over time. They are just normal, mundane people, after all, and yet the documentaries about them just got longer and longer, clocking in at 2 hours or more, when the first one is a snappy 39 minutes. It started to seem like really bad reality TV. And all the artfulness of that first one seemed to be totally drained out over time. I had to stop watching and could not continue.
The really magnificent documentary might be the final one, when all these people have passed on and some kind of grand retrospective of their lives can take place that attempts to draw some conclusions about this grand experiment. So give it a shot if you like, but it was too much for me.