
A documentary on a pride of lions and their buffalo prey trapped on an island in the Okavango delta.... (Full plot summary below)
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A documentary on a pride of lions and their buffalo prey trapped on an island in the Okavango delta.
Leave your thoughts about Relentless Enemies: Lions and Buffalo.
| User ReviewAdam BThe incredible story of lions and water buffalo on the Delta Plain in Botswana. A certain pride of lions have evolved in order to compete with the water buffalo, the only option for them as prey. The Jouberts have managed to acquire some phenomenal footage, and I highly recommend this documentary to anyone. |
| User ReviewKenneth HI watched this documentary twice. The first time, on February 28 2008, I was mainly looking for this one particular scene I had seen on television and YouTube where a group of Cape buffalo mob and kill several African lion cubs. I didn't know what that show was and was searching obsessively for it, and I had thought that, since Relentless Enemies was about lions and buffalo, that it might be the one that had that footage. Well it turned out it wasn't the one, and I was too concerned about finding that particular footage to focus on just watching it for its own merits, so I wasn't super impressed and gave it a mixed review and 3.5 stars. I always wanted to go back and do a proper viewing, and with The Last Lions coming out in theatres in mid-March 2011 I decided it was time, and I watched it again on March 18 2011, this time focusing more on the documentary itself. I came away with a much better impression this time and decided to raise my rating to 4 stars. As I noticed before, Relentless Enemies was filled with stunningly beautiful footage and plenty of intense predator-prey action between African lions and Cape buffalo. The narration, provided ably by Jeremy Irons, explained the action as a series of power shifts between the evenly-matched opponents, lions and buffalo, with psychology (e.g. confidence and fear) often more important a factor than physical or numerical strength. The narration also took care to point out the anatomical and behavioral adaptations these particular lions had for hunting buffalo. In the early part of the documentary, the lions seemed to be doing well, making multiple buffalo calf kills. Later in the documentary, things even up more, with the buffalo fighting back and driving off lion attacks. I did find one scene of buffalo attacking lion cubs, but it wasn't the one I had been looking for, and it wasn't very long or exciting either - we just see a buffalo briefly rustling around in some brush, and then later we see that a cub suffered an injury that it eventually dies from. As with the first viewing, the back-and-forth lion attacks and buffalo defenses began to feel a bit repetitive after watching more than an hour of it, though it didn't feel as much so as it did during the first viewing, probably because I was more focused this time. To break up any chance of monotony, the documentary also features cameos from some other African wild animals, such as crocodiles, elephants and hyenas. The hyena-lion confrontation was almost as fascinating as the buffalo-lion ones. There was also a brief confrontation between resident and invading male lions. I did think some of the narration was a little overly melodramatic for my tastes. There were some lines that went like "and now the lions will suffer a horrible fate!" that I thought were a bit much. Also, I wish the documentary provided some more background information on the basic biology of lions and buffalo, instead of just launching into the action without any sort of introductory information. As I noticed in the first viewing, the story seems to be told more from the point of view of the lions. We get plenty of footage and discussion of lion pride life, as well as a dramatic but silly subplot involving a cub-killing female that I thought was a bit contrived, as the narration never bothered to explain why that lion was killing cubs. I was hoping to see and hear more about buffalo herd life, but for the most part it wasn't really featured except for one really cool scene of males sparring. |