The greatest movie ever made..!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Like the films of Godfrey Reggio, Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Homo Sapiens"is a wordless look at the state of our planet but unlike Reggio's films we are not even permitted a music score to distract us, just a discordant soundtrack made of the noises of humanity and of nature and the sounds are just as important as the images, (the sound 'design' is credited to Florian Kindlinger and Peter Kutin). Where are we and what has happened? The empty, and often wrecked, buildings we see could be Earth after The Apocalypse. Consequently the film is as much sci-fi as it is documentary and like a number of such 'experimental' works is perhaps best viewed as a video installation in a gallery rather than in a cinema or on television. Did Geyrhalter stage this or simply record it? Either way, this is not a world you would want to inhabit yet in the back of your mind you know this is the world we do inhabit and it's far from a welcoming place. The Homo Sapiens of the title, by the way, are conspicuous by their absence.

Maybe if you have come in from another planet and have had no experience or thought about human cultures or accomplishments, this might be for you. The endless scenes of deserted remnants of buildings, nature, destruction and abandonment, seem not thought provoking, but dull and patronizing. Save your money, don't bother with this. It reminded me of "The Emperor's New Clothes" Those who are not thoughtful or unfit in some way will not see or be amazed. As I try to soften my opinion, maybe it could have been okay as a 20 minute short, not a full-length feature. If you live immersed in our current society you will probably fall asleep or stop watching. I love art films, art museums, public art and architecture, movies, literature, but not this. It is really long.

I saw Homo Sapiens recently and have to say that I was spellbound from start to finish. I can't say anything bad about this; it was a great investment of my time spent taking it all in.Apparently it took the better part of four years to complete & that's not surprising to me. The sound designer deserves major credit for his work... absolutely perfect in every way.If anyone had told me the formulae for this work before I saw it, I would have said that the creators run the risk of losing their audience, but that was far from the case. It didn't lack anything at all. The power of just images and sound and the exclusion of narration and music was a bold step to take but it proved that it can be done if it's done well.This is a very powerful movie / documentary and I think everyone should take the time to experience it. "Homo Sapiens" is one of the most thought provoking visual and audio statements that I have ever seen and I look forward to seeing it again and again. I honestly can't say that about many other movies. Now it's time to see what other movies this director has made.

A random series of establishing shots for post-apocalyptic movies that never get started, Homo Sapiens is more a slide show than a movie; yet, it's hypnotic and thought-provoking. Vacant malls, theaters, temples, groceries, neighborhoods, and parking lots are the stars here, no humans are to be seen. We can only assume each environment was abandoned by natural or man-made disaster. Gentle breezes flow through the frame and no soundtrack blares, manipulating your emotions, just the ambient tones of cups rolling in the breeze, plastic flapping, flies buzzing, or pigeons cooing. These may just be 30-second screen savers for complete nihilists, but it's amazing how, over several minutes (the documentary is about one and a half hours) the imagination begins firing and you find yourself constructing your own story. Some shots have clues as to their location; Asia, North America, the Middle East…but most shots could be anywhere, remnants of civilization wiped out, perhaps for months, perhaps years. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Bulgaria, Argentina. Absent any intrusion of a sense of story, or even editing sequence to give us a sense of time or place, we could easily be alien travelers or archaeologists, looking at the broken and rotting remains of some lost civilization. You may have seen a location or two in some movie or other; every scene looks like a movie set created by some top art director. The sound is the only real narrator, and if you listen closely, there are distant, perhaps phantom, sounds; alarms, a clang here or there. You'd half expect a narrator's voice to fire up at any moment; a Morgan Freeman, David Attenborough or Werner Herzog. The camera does not swoop or glide along a track; we are immobile, fixed, and the only thing that moves is nature.It would have been easier to string together a series of found footage from urban adventurists, but director/photographer Nikolaus Geyrhalter clearly wanted all his shots to have a consistent tone and lighting. Every shot could have been designed by a Stanley Kubrick or David Lean. There was some subtle digital manipulation or wind effects, but otherwise we are seeing it as is. There is no dramatic impact, just the matter-of-factness of humanity's bleak demise and nature's time-tested powers of reclamation. If there is a dramatic effect, it's that the scenes at the end are in winter climes, and the final image is consumed by a blizzard's whiteout. The shock, you realize afterward, is not the harrowing, desolate beauty of these post-apocalyptic sites—but the fact that they exist here and now.I've never seen rebar look so beautiful.