Homo sapiens

This is perhaps the most austere feature film I have ever seen. Comprised exclusively of static wide and medium-wide shots of abandoned man-made landscapes, these images are presented without commentary, musical accompaniment, or title cards (save a few brief credits at the beginning and end.) After the first few minutes, I knew this viewing experience was going to be a slog, but I pressed on out of a personal commitment to finish any movie I start. (It's only a few hours anyway, right?)

All of that said, I eventually came to develop a certain appreciation for the experience this movie provides (although I can't help but wonder if it didn't involve some version of the placebo effect or whether this might be the film equivalent of John Cage's 4'33".) As someone firmly entrenched within the overstimulated media and technological landscape of the 2010s, it was indeed rather soothing to simply focus my attention on... not much in particular. Certainly skill and craft were required of the filmmakers to select suitable locations, camera placement, and picturesque shots derived therein. The audio deserves particular remark, as the ambiance of each environment is what really sets this apart from, say, a coffee table book of still images. As mentioned, the shots themselves are entirely static, with most containing only the barest traces of movement. Occasionally a small animal will flutter or hop into frame, but the runtime largely consists of empty spaces where people once stood. Given the absence of title cards, it became a banal guessing game to try to recognize where each location might be or what circumstances might have led these environments into such disrepair. I believe a number of shots depict the more famous abandoned locales of the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones and the Korean DMZ - but again, these are only guesses. I have purposely avoided reading for any further context before writing this review, so I can also only speculate on the filmmakers' intentions or pretensions with this production. The obvious question raised, especially given the glut of post-apocalyptic fiction in recent years, is whether our entire civilization might one day resemble the ruins onscreen; however, given that the various locations have been forsaken at different times and places and for different reasons, it is difficult to discern any larger statement being made. (As one might if the film consisted solely of radioactive towns or failed businesses, etc.)

My middle-of-the-road rating reflects my ambivalence on the question of whether this movie is worth watching or whether, frankly, it's any good. I certainly don't regret watching it, but it's definitely a hard sell. If you're still intrigued after reading this review, I recommend you view it the way I did: alone, in a quiet room, perhaps even in daylight (all of the shots appear to be lit by the sun), and with as few interruptions or distractions as possible. It will almost certainly be an endurance and concentration exercise, but by that token it may also be an opiate for the overstimulated mind.

I saw Homo Sapiens recently and have to say that I was spellbound from start to finish. I can't say anything bad about this; it was a great investment of my time spent taking it all in.

Apparently it took the better part of four years to complete & that's not surprising to me. The sound designer deserves major credit for his work... absolutely perfect in every way.

If anyone had told me the formulae for this work before I saw it, I would have said that the creators run the risk of losing their audience, but that was far from the case. It didn't lack anything at all. The power of just images and sound and the exclusion of narration and music was a bold step to take but it proved that it can be done if it's done well.

This is a very powerful movie / documentary and I think everyone should take the time to experience it. "Homo Sapiens" is one of the most thought provoking visual and audio statements that I have ever seen and I look forward to seeing it again and again. I honestly can't say that about many other movies. Now it's time to see what other movies this director has made.

Homo Sapiens follows in the footsteps of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and more recently Samsara (2011) in the way of wordless, structure-less documentaries that evoke feeling through montage. Yet the mode in which Homo Sapiens assembles itself is about where the similarities end. Samsara went through great pains to capture some of the most beautiful images ever while Homo Sapiens is very much concerned with tableaux of decay and putridity.

The images are eerily, hauntingly, strikingly beautiful. Not a single human is in frame; remnants of civilization are ever present but always in the process of being reclaimed by the earth. There are fast food restaurants fallen in disrepair, abandoned office buildings, leaky subways stations and cracked concrete as far as the eye can see. The images recall the staid, defiant sculpture works of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in the way they are presented.

Homo Sapiens however detracts from its themes and crosses a line of good taste when it captures static frames of Fukushima amid a jumble of other images. The finiteness and fragility of human life does feel more visceral when these images come about but they feel a lot less real as well. To put it in certain terms, it feels like watching a superhero movie whereby the villain wins. The world changes thanks to a sudden and irreparable change masterminded by a singular entity. Whether purposeful or not, Homo Sapiens seems to want to put its post-apocalyptic chips on nuclear fallout.

We as a species now know better. Human civilization is likely not going to be wiped out swiftly by our own hand but in a worst case scenario, peter out in a cloud of good intentions. Not one big mistake but a thousand tiny mistakes made by a collective unconscious that lives for today; tomorrow be damned.

Homo Sapiens not a pleasant film to watch. The sound design doesn't even offer a modernist score a la Phillip Glass but rather bombards us with birds chirping, flies buzzing and wind bellowing against ceiling tiles and paper. And this is despite barely seeing anything but broken glass to justify such loud noise.

Ultimately Homo Sapiens is an art installation masquerading as a full-feature film. A moving photo album that, granted captures some interesting images but in its silence all but announces its themes. It then uses a terrible recent tragedy to mix the proverbial pot. A gambit that most may find fitting but to me, it feels like they're crossing a line.

Like the films of Godfrey Reggio, Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Homo Sapiens"is a wordless look at the state of our planet but unlike Reggio's films we are not even permitted a music score to distract us, just a discordant soundtrack made of the noises of humanity and of nature and the sounds are just as important as the images, (the sound 'design' is credited to Florian Kindlinger and Peter Kutin). Where are we and what has happened? The empty, and often wrecked, buildings we see could be Earth after The Apocalypse. Consequently the film is as much sci-fi as it is documentary and like a number of such 'experimental' works is perhaps best viewed as a video installation in a gallery rather than in a cinema or on television. Did Geyrhalter stage this or simply record it? Either way, this is not a world you would want to inhabit yet in the back of your mind you know this is the world we do inhabit and it's far from a welcoming place. The Homo Sapiens of the title, by the way, are conspicuous by their absence.

A random series of establishing shots for post-apocalyptic movies that never get started, Homo Sapiens is more a slide show than a movie; yet, it's hypnotic and thought-provoking. Vacant malls, theaters, temples, groceries, neighborhoods, and parking lots are the stars here, no humans are to be seen. We can only assume each environment was abandoned by natural or man-made disaster. Gentle breezes flow through the frame and no soundtrack blares, manipulating your emotions, just the ambient tones of cups rolling in the breeze, plastic flapping, flies buzzing, or pigeons cooing.

These may just be 30-second screen savers for complete nihilists, but it's amazing how, over several minutes (the documentary is about one and a half hours) the imagination begins firing and you find yourself constructing your own story. Some shots have clues as to their location; Asia, North America, the Middle East…but most shots could be anywhere, remnants of civilization wiped out, perhaps for months, perhaps years. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Bulgaria, Argentina. Absent any intrusion of a sense of story, or even editing sequence to give us a sense of time or place, we could easily be alien travelers or archaeologists, looking at the broken and rotting remains of some lost civilization. You may have seen a location or two in some movie or other; every scene looks like a movie set created by some top art director.

The sound is the only real narrator, and if you listen closely, there are distant, perhaps phantom, sounds; alarms, a clang here or there. You'd half expect a narrator's voice to fire up at any moment; a Morgan Freeman, David Attenborough or Werner Herzog. The camera does not swoop or glide along a track; we are immobile, fixed, and the only thing that moves is nature.

It would have been easier to string together a series of found footage from urban adventurists, but director/photographer Nikolaus Geyrhalter clearly wanted all his shots to have a consistent tone and lighting. Every shot could have been designed by a Stanley Kubrick or David Lean. There was some subtle digital manipulation or wind effects, but otherwise we are seeing it as is. There is no dramatic impact, just the matter-of-factness of humanity's bleak demise and nature's time-tested powers of reclamation. If there is a dramatic effect, it's that the scenes at the end are in winter climes, and the final image is consumed by a blizzard's whiteout. The shock, you realize afterward, is not the harrowing, desolate beauty of these post-apocalyptic sites—but the fact that they exist here and now.

I've never seen rebar look so beautiful.