Last and First Men

Rarely did the visuals match the story and music so I essentially listened to this. The score was nearly perfect and the story was quite compelling. As art, I liked it quite well. As a film, it wasn't very good. 36 hours later I'm still thinking about it.

I rarely watch arthouse films, and I seldom enjoy the few that I see. Yet somehow, I found myself captivated by this one. Partly because I had read Stapledon's book not too long ago, and been impressed by its vast scope. I found the strange way this film represents the story intriguing.

As others have said, on the surface this is 70 minutes of slow pans and zooms on strange concrete sculptures. The kind of style over substance that could easily be dismissed as pretentious navel-gazing. But for me, at least, it worked.

The core purpose of the visuals, I think, is to create a sense of alienation, of peering into a distant future world that we cannot fully grasp, through a medium - cross-time telepathy - that we are not built to comprehend. The film is made not as a story to be watched, but as if it were an actual telepathic message from the narrator, one of the last living men, waiting for the inevitable end of all of humanity in a future two billion years away.

This is not for everyone, and I won't disparage any of the 1 star reviews here. But if you "click" with what this film is trying to accomplish, it can be quite enjoyable.

Another reviewer said it. This is is not a movie which is much of the reason for the dislike. There are no moving images. There is simply panning over still figures while the narrator speaks, telling a classic SF story written in 1939. It's old sf and it has no traditional story either. The story itself is not to everyone's taste so neither is this "visual audio book". The story is not boring to most SF fans, but as a MOVIE, sure it is. Because nothing moves. There are no actors. It's not really a movie at all in the normal sense. It's one of the most unfilmable stories ever written.

I can't fault the people who like this one OR the people who don't. The writing is wonderful, and Tilda Swinton's narration is sonorous, but the visuals really add nothing, and the pacing is painfully slow.

Visually, we do get the sense of a dead planet. We get it hammered into us shot by excruciating shot for the entire duration of the film. It's rather fatiguing.

I don't want to argue with the people who like it. If you're so taken with the story that it kept you involved, then great. The film makers could have done a lot more with it. The visuals could have told much more of a story, even with keeping the same approach. Unfortunately, for me the experience was that of a half-hour audiobook crammed into an hours worth of a film.

A futuristic movie with bare visuals, a Gregorian style chant in the background and the soothing voice of the wonderful Tilda Swinton giving the history of a neo human race on a dying earth. This is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but I found it both relaxing and stimulating, whilst making you think. A thumbs up from me.