Naqoyqatsi
Director: Godfrey Reggio
Year Released: 2002
Rating: 0.5
Reggio's "thesis" - that the future is to be that of constant war and our lives are going to be ruled by/permanently linked to technology - is given the most banal and simplistic treatment possible by jumbling images together of tidal waves, babies, celebrities and commercials and hoping this synthesis produces profound results. Profound it is most certainly not ... and what's worse: the movie is an insult to one's intelligence. "Technology" is designated by monstrous, foreboding zeroes and ones flying across the screen, "war" is that of faceless men marching and there's never a lack of images of zebras running and African children (to be different, they're presented as photographic negatives). Simply rummaging through the National Archives, checking out classic reels and stringing them together without a narrative or purpose - very rarely are they ever meaningfully juxtaposed against each other - is not effective moviemaking.
