the audience applauded

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

"Powaqqatsi" is the second picture in filmmaker Godfrey Reggios' "...Qatsi" trilogy, a series of features that basically meld visuals and music without resorting to a conventional narrative. This one has a message, clearly stated throughout, about the "cost of progress". Its first half shows us different rural cultures all over the world (from Nepal to India to Kenya, etc.), and derives a great deal of impact from giving us a portrait of good, old-fashioned, honest hard work, as well as displaying a cornucopia of beautiful images. The heartfelt music score is once again the work of Philip Glass, and it supplements the images wonderfully, although it can be repetitive.Where the picture becomes a little less interesting is in the next 25 minutes or so, when we're confronted with the sights and sounds of the urban jungle in which many of us exist. Among the visuals utilized during this portion are those things that we all experience everyday: advertising, newscasts, and the like. But it all comes together in the final quarter, where we see that progress does come at its price; that it can lead to loss of identity, and be built on the backs of others.All done without the use of a narrator, this is documentary-style filmmaking of a different variety. It does force one to stop and think about the world we live in, and about all the things that many of us take for granted.This viewer went in blind to this picture without having seen "Koyaanisqatsi", the previous film in this trilogy. And one doesn't have to have done so. The material has a compelling nature regardless.The title is a Hopi word, explained at the conclusion (before the end credits). It means a life form that consumes other life forms in order to extend its own existence. That pretty much sums up the whole theme of the film right there.One of the most highbrow projects that the legendary Golan-Globus team (of Cannon Group fame) ever made.Seven out of 10.

Koyaanisqatsi is one of the 10 best films that has ever been made, in my opinion. It was a totally new cinema experience and the music and images were perfectly combined to give a very powerful message. Elements of the film have been copied incessantly since. Powaqqatsi, again, didn't have as much of an effect on me but was clearly made with a lot of passion and attention. All a bit Fair Trade hemp, but certainly watchable. With a masterpiece and a half under his belt I never thought Godfrey Reggio would make anything as bad as this to finish off the trilogy. The computer animation on this is terrible. It looks incredibly out of date for 2002, like a 1993 Future Sound Of London video. I'm led to wonder what today's computer animation, so shiny to our eyes, will look like 10 years down the line. You never can tell, though funnily enough, hand-drawn animation like Snow White still looks amazing. I have no idea what Mr Reggio is trying to communicate with his trippy fractals, shimmering ones and zeros, and clunky computer icons. There is one visual trick in this film- making every image all fuzzy and reversing the colours- and it's a damned ugly trick. It really doesn't seem as if he had any other thought behind this than "Oh, I'll saturate everything in neon- that'll make it look more techno". Perhaps he is trying to say that the world is ugly now, he's not going to treat us to the breathtaking magnificence of his earlier work because he's lost hope for us, we are now entirely out of touch with nature. Well maybe that is true, but there's no need to make something so unpleasant to punish us for it. This is an absolute mess.

The imaginative slow-motion documentary without any line,sequence, camera just goes through nature , cities and public over third world counties. Everydays routines seems amazing , ordinary motions put in slow are breath-taking.Sense for camera scenes and views and extraordinary shots make this one worth to see. Plus mixed with Philip Glass's composed music - it is relaxing and mild. Also you can find some scenes showing our world going to destructive end and the most moving scene in the end when there is shown that we mostly even can not see pictures like these because this "kind" of world is situated behind a certain curtain, for most of us hard to see through - we live above and look only to our reflections.

As mentioned earlier by others, this film is basically a weakerversion of Baraka (by Koyaanisqatsi cinematographer Ron Fricke),a film very much like Powaqqatsi, focussing some more on thereligious rituals of southern hemisphere cultures.Powaqqatsi definitely is a disappointment as a follow up ofKoyaanisqatsi. There is no consistence of any kind. Some scenesare going on for way too long (the gold mine sequence in the SerraPelada, Brazil is nice but becomes tiresome already before themain title). Other sequences are uneven and cluttered and wedon't know where we are. The movie is almost entirely overcranked (in slow motion), asopposed to the perfect combination of time lapse (much of it withmotion blur to make it smoother plus smooth camera panning),slow motion and the use of stock footage in Koyaanisqatsi whichhad a wonderful atmosphere to it and works on many levels. Powaqqatsi is supposed to make no statement about how thingsshould be - according to director Godfrey Reggio. Why then thesequence editing US American tv commercials and militaryimages (is this evidence of how Reggio felt about Powaq. notcoming close to Koyaanis. in meaning)? Powaq.'s photography is of great quality, yet many motifs aresimply not interesting enough to be on screen for that long. I havethe feeling that the team simply didn't come home with enoughinteresting footage in the can and had to make something out ofwhat they had in the editing room. The few great shots which letsus emerge in unfamiliar worlds don't make up for the higherpercentage of footage of no interest whatsoever.Check Ron Fricke's "Baraka" to see what Powaqqatsi could havebeen and should have been. I also agree about some comments regarding Philip Glass' score.It is sometimes is flat out corny and sounds very much like whatone might expect in a late 1980s "we are all one world" beer orcookie commercial. Philip Glass is a great and original composer for symphonicminimalism, but as a composer of world music he hasn't got thevein. The Powaq. score is several notches below the magic ofwhat he did for Koyaanis. Again: Baraka has a better score as well.Watch Powaqqatsi to ifill yourself in on the second installment ofthe ..qatsi trilogy. It's not a bad film, but IMHO Godfrey Reggio wasunable to deliver the footage for this concept. Ron Fricke did it in"Baraka".