After hearing so much about Koyaanisqatsi, I bought the DVD and its sequel in a double pack. When I watched them for the first time it was back to back, and I'm sorry to conclude that the naïve, ethnic romanticism of Powaqqatsi is unfit to bear such close commercial relation to the masterpiece, Koyaanisqatsi.
Horribly reminiscent of National Geographic trailers, it's doubtful anyone but the most backwardly PC tree-hugger, or perhaps the Weekly World News-reading American, will find Powaqqatsi revelatory or profound. None of the chilling self-awareness or mathematical beauty the original evoked is even approached; there is mostly a tinted assembly of stereotypes, very much concieved from a Northern/Western perspective.
The objective, alien assault on the familiar that was so shocking when trying to absorb Koyaanisqatsi is eerily missing from the mix, and the presentation of the decaying "old way" of life is little more than a light confection of slums, old people, children and temples, stitched into a jarring quilt of assorted Asian, African and South American agricultural and urban vignettes. The slightly patronising notion the title suggests - the corruption of innocence by technology, or the consumption of life by an unsubtle metaphorical demon - is barely present and makes its welcome entry into the fray at a rather late stage, ultimately failing to look like anything but natural progression. The staged shot of the child being clouded by dust from the truck in Luxor was a desperate artistic measure, and too little too late.
It would be fair play to argue that this is not assessing the movie on its own merits, but to be honest, if it weren't part of this trilogy, it would be discarded as a clumsy, undergraduate-standard montage of dry Third World clichés, which if not filmed at super-romantic frame rates would probably come in at around 30 minutes.
As a huge Philip Glass fan, I would comment here upon the music if I weren't so bitterly wounded by the dismal score, which succeeded only in making a chore of an already slightly tedious venture.
