Awaken

As a devoted follower of Reggio's work, I have rewatched his latest film countless times, yet I find myself struggling to fully embrace it. The final quarter of the documentary is undoubtedly compelling, but it's also somewhat vexing. The film places an excessive amount of emphasis on youth and women, neither of which have any real bearing on the film's central theme. In contrast, Reggio's earlier masterpiece, Koyaanisqatsi, was more impactful because it focused on the essence of what truly matters. To put it bluntly, this particular work is a complete dud.

I tried to watch this at normal speed first, than I was annoyed at the slow mo and timelapses. I speed things up until I reach x3 speed, and still it was too slow and couldn't continue watching it. I stopped after 15min.

If you like timelapses, repetitive images and slow motion and zen music, it's a good movie for you but I prefer Samsara 10000x better than this.

Unbelivable movie. I fell in love with it ! Joseph Trapanese transer you into the another reality

Was like from another world. I can't find enough words to describe its atmosphere. Wish could have seen it at the cinema.

It doesn't really have anything to say except we went on a trip and took some pretty pictures in slow motion, and we got a cool new drone.

It's essentially a magazine pictorial, all lens flares and "let's do it again with a reflector panel", no natural location sound etc etc, without any insightful comments and nothing really hanging it all together aside from some early 21st century camera features, the aforementioned slow mo, timelapse, and drone footage. That was cool last century, but is that enough any more? We've all got it on our phones these days.

The real skill these days is having something to say with the footage, and it's a skill missing from this film outside of, 'pretty'.

I doubt Malick had much involvement in this outside of lending his name to it, although his recent output does share the same visual over content failing of this piece.