Naqoyqatsi

Being a big fan of Koyannisqatsi and Philip Glass in general, i was looking forward to this quite a bit. It's unfortunate that this film turned out to be as cliched and flat as the first film was pioneering and bold. Some of the music, especially the first and last pieces, is stunning, and sounds amazing in Dolby Digital. Reggio's images, with some notable exceptions, such as some famous works of art morphing into one another (with a technique far more interesting than the typical morphing), are nothing new, and the usual topics of the hazards of technology and corporate greed feel all too well-worn. Whereas the first film may have inspired a style of tv commercials, Naqoyqatsi just feels like one.

I read the other review here before seeing the movie and desperately hoped it was wrong - it wasn't. Koyaanisqatsi was, and still is, a great movie -- full of sweeping images and magnificent scope, the movie certainly had an eloquent statement to make. I was hoping for something similar in the third installment.

This was an exercise in tedium. It seemed as though the filmmakers raided the Time-Life library of iconic 20th century images and fed them through a special effects filter. It's as if they felt that what worked in Koyaanisqatsi, would work here -- extreme closeup, slow-motion etc. But the images here had nothing to say.

There was no emotion. Just wall-to-wall shots of everything from dollar signs, 0's and 1's, faces, bodies, computer chips, JFK, Martin Luther King, Bin Laden, buildings ripped by tornados... you get the picture. To make matters worse, everything was put through amateurish f/x-- mosaic, grain, vortex, inverted.

While it may have been a technical marvel, the end result felt empty and labored. Footage near the end consisted of juxtaposing images of real global street violence with video game violence -- but so what? Nothing new was said here. A real shame to end this way...

After reading different comments about this movie, I've decided to see it, and I'm really surprised because what I have found has little to do with what I thought it was.

Naqoyqatsi is about the loss of our natural perception of reality and its substitute: the image itself as a product of technology, the image as a weapon in a globalized war. And here comes the apparent incoherence, because the film is a parade of these images, a product of the same technological violence it is reflecting and criticizing. That's not hypocrisy; the contradiction is part of the film itself.

Although I do not completely support Reggio's point of view, I admire the way he expresses it through his films without impositions of any kind, so that the viewer can find his own perspective. While watching Naqoyqatsi, I was asking for the "original" pictures that were below those distortions and filters, but soon I realized the real world wasn't there. It was like "OK, so that's all... Well, let's see it".

A few words about the inevitable comparison with it's predecessors: if you are looking for something like Koyaanisqatsi, go see Koyaanisqatsi again. Naqoyqatsi is a different film. It does well as the third part of the Qatsi Trilogy, but like the other two, has its own "personality". And I think it's a great film. Maybe not a masterpiece like Koyaanisqatsi, but a great film.

'Between innocence and politics' would be a Donnie Darkesque mistake to describe the experience of this movie. There's more than one dimension in the world of Reggio and Glass. Especially Jon Kane adds a dimension in my opinion. At times I was a bit disappointed that the creators couldn't resist the temptation of getting rather political and explicit. That wasn't necessary to entertain the audience more. Some may put it like certain sequences are on the verge of being political, but the engagement annoyed me. The Beastie Boys video 'Something's got to give' did it better.

Animation/CGI has been completely aesthetically accepted as means of returning to the level of part one with bits of Tron, bytes of the Matrix, snippets of 2001 and views of Avalon (Oshii, 2001). Together with Glass's magnificent tunes and 'skywalker sound' Naqoyqatsi almost reaches the massive level of Koyaanisqatsi.

Reggio and Kane return to computer-mainboards, cultivation of nature, escalation of conflicts, but this powerful and almost scientific exploration of all kinds of human conflicts still has little intellectual value. Not even if it featured a thousand computer generated symbols, Leonardo Da Vincis, Madame Tussauds, American presidents, Hieronymus Boschs, terrorists or babies. The explicit and excessive use of facial icons and expressions diminishes the universal value as well. I was charmed by the portrayal of internal fights that sportsmen and -women experience (but why did they forget rowing sequences?). It still is way better than the picturesque Powaqqatsi, not only because this has less stock shots, apart from some military parades and nuclear mushrooms. I'm glad Soderbergh shoved it forward. 8/10 (Koyaanisqatsi after reconsidering 9/10, Powaqqatsi 6/10)

In the hustle and bustle of a chaotic world, we often don't take the time to stop and really look at all the beautiful things that tend to pass us by unnoticed. It is Godfrey Reggio's aim in `Naqoyqatsi' – as it was in his previous `Koyaanisqatsi' and `Powaqqatsi' - to focus our attention on all the artistry inherent in the shapes, forms and patterns that make up our universe. His film is a succession of images, some of them derived from nature (clouds, ocean waves), others from Man (buildings and bridges), and others from computer-generated fantasy. These he filters through his observant camera eye, state-of-the-art processing and ingenious editing to create a cinematic tone poem. The element that most separates `Naqoyqatsi' from Reggio's earlier works is the much heavier reliance on camera trickery and CGI effects here. For the most part, Reggio has moved away from nature as his subject and towards the cyber realities of the current age. Thus, the altered emphasis in form seems not merely appropriate but thematically valid as well, as Reggio examines a world in which nature has been largely eclipsed by computer technology.

At the end of the film we are told that `Naqoyqatsi' is a Hopi word meaning, essentially, `war' and `violence.' I'm not sure, though, that Reggio has really earned that title with his film. True, he does include a few shots of mushroom clouds, of street riots, of violent video games, but they hardly account for the majority of the images we see. Perhaps it is the clash between nature and technology that he is referring to here, but the title – at least as defined at the end - still seems to fall a bit short of the mark.

Still, Reggio is often able to find poetry in even the most disturbing of images. For instance, there's an amazing shot of a trio of crash test dummies performing a macabre, yet strangely beautiful slow motion `dance' in a simulated airplane crash. It is but one of the many unforgettable images in the film.

Enhanced by the haunting music of Philip Glass, `Naqoyqatsi' offers a dazzling kaleidoscopic view of the world, a visual tour de force for the aesthetically inclined.