Saturday, April 6, 2019

Naqoyqatsi


Runtime: 89 minutes

Directed by: Godfrey Reggio

Starring: This is a documentary

From: Miramax

Oof:

Boy has THIS not aged well... if it ever was fine wine to begin with.

In the past I've watched both Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi as they were very interesting and worthwhile 1980's documentaries which had great scores from Philip Glass and without saying a word, it was up to the viewer to figure out what director Godfrey Reggio was trying to say. The effect of technology was one interpretation with the first two movies, and whether or not that's right, that was made explicit here.

Instead of lovely scenery and interesting images from around the world that expertly showed many different aspects of living on planet Earth and will be forever timeless, this has... a lot of computer graphic images that look pretty terrible by 2019 standards, random footage which seem utterly pointless, and footage which for some reason has ugly, ugly filers all over it. The movie was not even aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I know that the message was supposed to be “technology has now fully taken over the world” (which I say was true in the early 2000's, and incredibly so now with the advent of smartphones, people using less and less physical cash to pay for items, and the rise of such sites as eBay and Amazon) and there's also some half-assed message about violence but to me, this falls in the “pretentious claptrap” bucket and is far less successful than the first two films in this trilogy. Philip Glass's score was cool... it's on YouTube if I want to hear it separately, although I couldn't help but think of how disappointed I was with this film if I were to ever do such a thing.

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