Naqoyqatsi

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Customer reviews

review by: Alex date: 2008-10-15 rating:
Disappointing
Given that Koya & Powa have lived for so so long and are beautiful masterpieces, Naqoy just isn't really up to the imagery we are used to. There's very little, if any, uniqueness to this; nothing much more I could do myself, unlike the first two films.

I think Philip Glass really needs to start evolving his music. He's barely written anything new for 20 years. C'mon Phil...! The arpeggiators are wearing thin. Look back to the Mid/Late 80's and remind yourself what you were doing then.

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review by: date: 2008-09-06 rating:
Powerful but not easy...
I think film suffers the existance of the two easier-to-watch predecessors.
I think the music in this one is wonderful, the images are not as beautiful as the natural ones of Koia but equally strong - almost hypnotic at times. The logical thread is difficult to follow and it either needs repeted viewings or some external help. I couldn't get it.
What in my opinion spoiled it a bit are the recurrent similiarities with the previous movies (the approach is the same: music+imagery, the music is often veeeeery similar to Koia, some scenes of autos lights are a copy from Koia, etc...) which keep tempting an uncaptured viewer into thinking that this third release was merely a money-making exercise trying to capitalise on past successes.
I too like other reviewers was looking at the timer waiting for the end, but now I have it in the background as I am writing, and it's not bad at all...

My tokenworth for those who haven't watched any of the Qatsi? Watch them in reverse order... 1) Naqoy, 2) Powaq, 3) Koia. It would be great to get your comments.

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review by: date: 2008-08-22 rating:
Very poor
The first two films in the sequence (Koy ... and Pow ...) are excellent - probably at the top of my favourite film list. This one is at the top of the biggest disappointments list. It could have been so much yet became so little. The initial two films have grave points to make bt manage to make then through stunning and dramatic works. This one fails in everything it looks to achieve. Through watching the entire film all I could do was keep looking at the "time remaining" display on the DVD hoping it your finish soon. Whilst I will not lend my Koy... and Pow... to anybody (too good to risk not getting them back) I will happily give this one away - which is a real shame.

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review by: date: 2008-08-14 rating:
A fitting finale
The film, a masterpiece of film-making wider in scope than any other, manages to tie up the narrative themes of both its preceding parts (the political, the personal, the technological and environmental) and present a clear and damning portrayal of our current way of life. A world of excess, where ambition and profit has far outsripped any other consideration. With a fifteen year gap between Powaqatsi and its final part, Nagoyqatsi, much has changed. The primitive (and now dated) editing techniques from Powaqatsi, have been superceded by revolutionary and groundbreaking visuals that have dated significantly since the films completion. The narrative structure is now even less linear. The viewer, trained by the conceptual leaps and links of the previous two films, is now encouraged to take even greater leaps of faith.

Nagoyqatsi deconstructs everything : the virtual world is shown to be as real as the artificial, and self-imposed, constructs of society. Images of endless computer banks meld into endless rows of skyscrapers... footage of nature is seamlessly morphed into traffic, into people, into rows of numbers, rain, and a truly terrifying montage of nuclear explosions. Rain becomes a series of endlessly rotating Zeroes and Ones, frame graphics of houses, diagrams of nuclear explosions, and ghostly abandoned buildings. Every form of violence - both real and imagined - from the virtual world of Doom to the LA Riots.

The rule of Nagoyqatsi is not only that of "Life as war" but that mankind itself is at war with everything else. "A way of life that consumes others in order to survive". Mankind cannibalises anything and everything in its unthinking quest to reproduce like a virus. Symbols meld into each other, the dollar, the yen, the Pizza Hut logo, all transform into Swastikas, cogs, wheels, and all these things become clear. Far more than its predecessors, Nagoyqatsi is explicit in it's imagery : in our quest for all things to be faster, quicker, better, more, we will soon be extending beyond ourselves. We will consume beyond ourselves, devour ourselves, extinct ourselves.

At the films conclusion we see just how fragile we are. The world shrinks to nothing. Stars surround us, and the earth becomes just another light twinkling in the envelope of space. A beautiful as the view from a spaceship overlooking the earth, as chilling as seeing a crisscross pattern of lines from the same spaceship, vapour trails from ICBM's, the soft, small spots of lights on the earths surface that used to be cities and could now be explosions. Nagoyqatsi is our warning. This world is fragile. Our life hangs in the balance. We will destroy ourselves should we not want to save ourselves.


review by: date: 2007-05-10 rating:
Time to Call it a Day
Prior to Naqoyqatsi, I had only seen the first instalment in this series, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and there is a need to refer to that film before commenting on the most recent. On release Koyaanisqatsi was fairly groundbreaking stuff, using cinematic techniques such as fast and slow motion and time lapse photography to comment on the way in which man is at odds with, and is destroying, nature. A relentless score by Philip Glass reinforced this message, augmenting the sensation that things were really getting out of control. As a piece of music in its own right I personally found the sound track extremely irritating but in the context of the images it worked perfectly.

I assume that the second instalment, Powaqqatsi, was much of the same and now we have part three, Naqoyqatsi, which is not groundbreaking stuff at all. While it is easy to describe the imagery as 'stunning', it's not actually that special - we see this kind of thing all the time on TV. Unfortunately Reggio has discovered digital imaging and has fallen into the trap, like many others, of using special effects purely for the sake of it, rather than considering how a particular image can be enhanced, augmented or strengthened (if indeed it needs to be), by using computer generated effects. Techno fiends will doubtless by excited by all this but the overall effect is to weaken the message (which is largely the same as that demonstrated in Koyaanisqatsi), although here the emphasis is on the effect of technology. And of course, Reggio is using technology to make his statement so that the whole piece becomes ironic if not paradoxical. Had this notion been implicit in the film then the work would have gained strength, but one gets the feeling that it was overlooked. While there is absolutley nothing wrong with Reggio's philosophy, the technology issue is a major flaw.

As a piece of music, the Glass score is certainly more accessible than that in Koyaanisqatsi but because if this, it detracts from the imagery, giving the piece watered down feel. See it, but I would suggest seeing the earlier pieces first. The result is little more than an extended pop video and has about the same level of interest. Thankfully this is the last in the series. Reggio should have quit while he was ahead: well before this.

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