The manmade visuals is reminiscent of Manufactured Landscapes (2006) or Koyaanisqatsi (1982) without Philip Glass music. This does talk to the people on the ground and give it more context. I do miss the Philip Glass music. Of course, ML is also made by Jennifer Baichwal. This is more informative which keeps the movie from being repetitive.

The movie starts with a great looking fire and one wonders what is being burnt. It should flash cut to a herd of elephants. That's the move. This does try to lay out broad chapters for the movie but it doesn't really help. The Alicia Vikander narration very much fits the film. The audience gets berated for an hour by a tired Swedish environmentalist. Overall, it has the artificial beauty, sometimes hypnotic, and has a small bit of information.

The Scarred Epoch The Barren Epoch The Ravaged Epoch The Desert Epoch The Scorched Epoch The Wasted Epoch The Extinct Epoch The Drowned Epoch The Poisoned Epoch The Plastic Epoch The Final Epoch

The subject matter for this documentary is very serious, and it should make you angry, I was angry, but at the film not the topic.

It starts at an incredibly slow pace, very little dialogue and the names of the locations seemingly camouflaged into the background and easy to miss. Only 10 minutes in I checked to see what the runtime was, 1hr 26m, that's nothing but boy did I feel this was going to go slowly, and it did.

So to get to why this makes me angry, the narrator sounds half asleep, even sounding like she's given up on life or the planet itself already. Just reeling off depressing numbers about things that may or may not be true, there's just no authority here, and that's the problem.

To paraphrase a quote from the astronaut Edgar Mitchell 'Look at that, you son of a *beehive*.' referring to seeing the planet as a whole for the first time and how precious it is to us. That is the attitude that needs to be adopted.

I care deeply about the health of our planet and this documentary, if anything made me care less. We should be told off, scolded for our lackadaisicalness. Not here. While it can be said some of the imagery tells the story of a thousand words, I only felt that from a few shots and it could have been presented in a much more engaging and informed way. Some of the shots looked pretty, but it was difficult to grasp exactly what I was looking at and indeed the relevance. I'm sure the camera crew enjoyed the task of their busman's holiday jetsetting around the globe to show us the damage idle humans are causing.

The film did give me an audible 'wtf!!!?' moment, I even repeatedly said it aloud to myself, but this was to the discovery of a church in Africa that was built to accommodate one million people!!! That blew my mind, and to see the Africans' unrelenting will to be happy despite horrible jobs and blinkered belief in fairy tales that only assist in the destruction of their lands via their incredible talent to carry things on their heads.

I should have felt ashamed after watching this, embarrassed at what is happening to our planet but mainly I was left slightly awestruck by some of the incredible engineering used to bring about this destruction. Unfortunately I feel this was a very weak effort; the type of person like myself to watch this will gain no new knowledge or understanding, and the type of person who would be less receptive to the hard truths will be so bored there is no way they will watch to conclusion.

If this was made in an attempt to try and open people's eyes to what we have become and the need to learn to apply the brakes and work smarter, great. If this was made to convince the world of science to collectively admit we are at a new epoch.... write a scientific paper!! This was not the latter I feel, far from it.

As said in the heading, the seminal Koyaanisqatsi achieved so much more, with no dialogue and no words on screen. It's 38 years old but equally relevant today as it was then, watch it and ignore this.

As a footnote I would like to say obviously the quote further up did not use the word 'beehive'; this childish obsession with censoring words is analogous to humanity's stupidity to ignore real world problems.