Naqoyqatsi

'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)

Welcome to the digital age, a world of speed, cultural hybridity, multi media, and perceptual overload, all of which are expressed beautifully in Godfrey Reggio's third entry Naqoyquatsi.

This one is vastly different from the previous two. Wheras Koyaanisqatsi and Powaquatsi were done in the real world, much of Naqoyqatsi is done on the computer. Using just about every computer graphic available at the time, Naqoyqatsi feels more like a piece of art than the other two. After deciding that Powaqatsi was a dud, I was pleased to see that Godfrey Reggio made a recovery. Naqoyqatsi is almost on par with it's fore father Koyanisquatsi, although depending on which on you see first, you may prefer this one. This one strikes me as less epic than Koyanis, in part because it's faster editing allows for much more advanced montages which are so overwhelming at times that they occasionally provoke headache.

The message behind this film is the way humanity is a competitive species. I think Alfred Adler would adore this movie. One of Freud's students, he believed that the human condition is based on seeking superiority. Naqoyqatsi shows us two forms of competition. One is sporting events, and the other is physical war and fighting.

Phillip Glass once again, works his musical magic, although it seems like some of the score was borrowed from Koyaanisqatsi. Together, Reggio and Glass have provided a trilogy of sights and sounds that defy all the conventions of cinema, to favour aesthetics.

"Naqoyqatsi" is an experience different of what many viewers might seen it in the past 20 years. Remember the 30 last minutes of "2001: A Space Odyssey" when there was only visual effects images and the frightening music in the background and no words, no quotes were heard? Now, imagine almost 90 minutes of only that, the only exercise you have to do is sit, watch and think about why those images appeared and their meaning. This is "Naqoyqatsi".

In this documentary director Godfrey Reggio, music composer Philip Glass (from "The Hours") and animated director Jon Kane created an enormous montage about many aspects of life on Earth. But his approach is to show how our society became violent and that progress is an important part of that cause. The first image that appears is the Babel Tower and after that technology appears in its several forms in buildings, computers, science, medicine, our human body capacities of doing miraculous things, the relation between men and the sports, and the decadence of the mankind in violent acts. All this achievement was possible because of technology.

One important thing showed here is the difference between what humans can do and what technology can imitate too. For instance, the adoration that we have with famous people. In a take, celebrities generated by computer walk by and the people are crazy about them, waving to them, taking photos. In the next scene we seen real artists walking in the red carpet; Marlon Brando, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Elton John and we see the difference between them and the digital celebrities. It might seem the same thing but it's not. We are really interested in the real people and not in some CGI creation.

Here comes the difficult part of this film: the discussion and what do we learn with "Naqoyqatsi". There's criticism and there isn't, it seems plausible in one moment and totally useless and pointless in the other. In the whole film there's no critic but after the credits roll in the end and the meaning of the word Naqoyqatsi is shown there's a criticism, there's the point of view of the director, and by that I mean that it might be too late for people to get the idea of what this movie is about. Naqoyqatsi is a word of a tribe that means: societies that lives by killing each other, people living of war. This is a statement towards our society that gave 10 steps forward and walked backwards in 30 steps. Our material evolution led to our physical destruction and will lead to our possible extinction. Atomic bombs, protests, dictatorships, dictators and their ideologies, weapons of mass destruction, all the math used by Einstein and Oppenheimer for good reasons used in the bad and dangerous ones. Since there's no quotes, captions and that sort of things many people will walk out of this documentary without understand what the director meant to say with it.

This is a patient, wordless, and mind blowing experience where only the visual and the real images are important. Many of the images are shown in slow-motion, giving the viewer time to think, formulate a thought about what he's seeing at the moment. And of course Philip Glass's music, in it's quiet and slow language. Very mental and hypnotic.

I recommend you to watch if possible a similar documentary called "Nós Que Aqui Estamos Por Vós Esperamos" (translated by "Here We Are Waiting for You") a Brazilian documentary that follows almost the same path of "Naqoyqatsi" but it has more messages, more substantial meaning and captions that explain things. In this documentary director Marcelo Masagão collected several images of the 20th Century and created a fictional story for those images stating the different aspects of the human mortality. It's terrific. 10/10 for both projects!

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.

Having seen Koyanisqatsi and Baraka I was very much looking forward to viewing this movie to see how Godfrey Reggio's view of the world has changed and what nuggets of visual wisdom he would impart to me this time around. Needless to say (if you read the summary) I was quite disappointed in the way Mr. Reggio presented his latest film.

If one is seeing this film then one is more than likely already familiar with, and highly sensitive to, the problems that are facing the Earth today. Naqoyqatsi seems to delight in pummeling the viewer with shot after out of focused, highly contrasted, digitally altered shot of the continued plagues of the world.

Yes Mr. Reggio, we know that war is bad, that ideological conformity is limiting, that destruction of the environment threatens our future. The task now at hand is not to document the continuation of these negative historical trends but to show those of us interested how we can begin to live our lives differently to alter the course of history.

After walking out of the movie I felt I had just left an extended 90 minute MTV Yo Yo Ma music video. And not a good MTV video but one of those I-can't-concentrate-for-more-than-2-seconds music videos. Disjointed, depressing, confusing and incoherent are the words I would use to best describe this movie. Skip it.