The Mystery of Easter Island

Did you know that when the already sparsely inhabited Easter Island was discovered in 1722, there wasn't a tree nor a bush on the place? Indeed, since it's more modern-day attachment to Chile on the South American mainland, it has depended on what is now the annual visit of a ship to bring in much of it's vegetataion and the supplies that sustain a 1950s sheep ranch - and that includes the sheep too. Exploring deeper into this arid and barren territory, we see the first of what we have come to see. One of five hundred and eighty-five statues, most at least thirty feet high and weighing more than fifty tons, that inexplicably scatter this volcanic island. We are also shown something of the altogether more recent "birdman cult" and as the suns sets, the questions of who built these collosi, why and probably more interestingly - just how they shipped them around their island are posed but not answered. As a documentary, it's all fairly basic photography with no attempt made to actually explain the mysteries to which it's title refers, and coupled with some really quite bland music and a narration that seems to refer to the "unholy" without any clue as to what might, or might not, have constituted the holy here millennia ago - it can be annoying, but it does explose another piece in a jigsaw that Thor Hayerdahl might have explored with one of his rafts, and it's worth ten minutes.