Naqoyqatsi. Very weak. Sinks itself from the beginning with gorgeous black-and-white footage of a ruin; this is the last unaltered view of the world in the film. Everything else is sped up, slowed down, in false color, or faked altogether, at which point it’s hard to avoid the impression of a very long series of projects by students at the San Francisco Academy of Art. The score by Glass is nice, but after the ten millionth arpeggio, so uninteresting that any emotional appeal it might have had earlier in the movie is redacted from the memory. This is unfair to Yo-Yo Ma, who is deservedly memorable.

Speaking more generally, the appeal of films in this genre (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Baraka) depends to a great extent on the unexpectedness of each new image presented. Time-lapse work is beautifully effective at this, because no matter whether you have seen, for example, Paddington Station at rush hour, you have not seen it at any speed other than the normal one. One would expect false color to be equally effective, especially given its long history in science as an analysis tool (I refrain from quoting Proust). In Naqoyqatsi it falls flat, however, and it’s not just because some of the CGI work is really cheesy. Rather, it’s that unexpectedness only exists in context, and, we might argue, a semantic context. At the risk of sounding tautological, nothing can be unexpected in a world where nothing is expected. Naqoyqatsi fails where Koyaanisqatsi succeeds precisely because the director took on too much freedom and allowed himself to manipulate the images of the film however he liked.

Reggio no doubt would counter that he intended to portray a world of infinite, meaningless possibility, because that is what we now live. And that the only way to critique the increasingly abstract world in which we live is to produce a film in which everything is abstracted. Fine. But it is a negative assertion for which he provides no corresponding positive, and it is not enough to go around asking “What if we live in the Matrix?” when common experience makes such a proposition unlikely. And the Director’s Statement is a fatuous piece of artspeak in which the term shibboleth does in fact appear, and incorrectly at that.