It's 'The End of the World' as We Know It (Yawn) -- All Too Well

One nasty peril facing adventurers who creak through the ice of the Arctic in their 180-ton boat is the "intense, nagging boredom" of the voyage, or so says the narrator of "Future Earth: Journey to the End of the World" on MSNBC tomorrow night. Unfortunately, as has not infrequently been the case with nature documentaries -- even the Armageddon-y ones -- boredom becomes quite a challenge for the audience, too.

What do the producers do to meet the challenge? We'll give you three guesses. (Hint: special effects.) Okay, 10-9-8-7 -- that's right! How about, say, a shot of the 42nd Street subway station in Manhattan under water. Good heavens, what a catastrophe. And then, of course, the tediously inevitable: our beloved gigantic Statue of Liberty bobbing about in the water as if she were a mere bathtub toy.

Who among us could imagine such monstrous, cataclysmic destruction? Who, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: Anybody who saw "The Day After Tomorrow" or any of about a dozen other prophetic futuristic fantasies forecasting global disaster wrought when the polar ice caps melt into mush and overflow.

O, the humanity! Not to mention the water. In "Journey," the first of a four-part "Future Earth" series, the nightmarish events perfunctorily depicted include the flooding of Florida to such a degree that Orlando would become the new Miami Beach, and as for the Keys, Jeez Louise! They'll submerge in a nonce and vanish in a snap.

Those who take a dim view of ridiculing floods, tsunamis and other forms of soggy devastation should be reassured that if those sorts of terribleness were portrayed with appropriate horror and conviction in "Journey," the urge to hoot would be easily suppressed. But in the past 10 or 15 years, fairly frequent moviegoers have seen all these mishaps and many others so credibly depicted -- via high-tech CGI illusions -- and with such stunning fidelity, and such numbing frequency, that even minimally sophisticated moviegoers have started taking them for granted.

A hole opens up in the Pacific Ocean and swallows the melting Golden Gate Bridge? Seen it! A towering skyscraper leans over on its moorings and falls against the skyscraper across the street, leaning against it for support like a drunk being helped home after a wild party? Seen that, too.

As it happens, similar sights are seen only briefly in "Journey," which is something of a bait-and-switch item, as documentaries go. The program may sound like an hour-long examination of horrors that could be perpetrated by a rise in greenhouse gases and commensurate increased melting of polar ice caps, but as thrilling as that may sound, it's primarily a video journal of an Arctic exploration undertaken by the eight-person and two-dog crew of a ship called the Tara (the token Southern Gothic among ice bashers?) from late 2006 to early 2007.

Surrounded by and trapped in oodles and acres of ice -- as everyone on board must have known it would be -- the Tara becomes "a virtual prison" for the scientists, technologists and plain old sailors on board, the narrator states, but then there is the occasional "astonishing find" and various "incredible discoveries" that perk up morale and make the journey allegedly historic -- despite, of course, that "intense, nagging boredom" that plague the crew.

Chocking the script with cliches is no help whatsoever: "Unlike cats, dogs don't have nine lives," the narrator says when a dog is injured during a fight with a bear, although it is noted that a dog can be "man's best friend." The crew finds the Arctic to be "a mythical and in some senses a mystical place . . . where explorers come to die -- or be severely disappointed." Gosh, are those the only options?

As it happens, the lackluster documentary not only resembles any number of Hollywood disaster movies but also bears a likeness, in substance and title, to the Discovery Channel's recent speculative documentary "Journey to the Edge of the Universe" and to the National Geographic Channel's "Aftermath: Population Zero," about what the Earth might be like once all the messy human beings have been depopulated from it.

Unfortunately, the most conspicuous way that the MSNBC documentary does not resemble those other two is in quality. On "Journey," the most endangered species appears to be TV documentaries themselves. If too many more of them are this bad, the whole genre may go the way of the gooney bird -- crash, bang, splat.

Future Earth: Journey to the End of the World (one hour) airs tomorrow night at 10 on MSNBC.