Review of Naqoyqatsi by Misshapen_Steed

Koyaanisqatsi is great in many ways. One of those ways is Reggio's deftness at finding both visual and thematic links between images. The film flows both logically and unpredictably the first time you see it. Reggio was never a subtle filmmaker, but it all made sense and the bluntness of it was part of the reason it worked.

Naqoyqatsi is a nightmare. Reggio's previously mentioned imaginal deftness has sadly metastasized into a sort of brain-death, a confusing onslaught of garbage images with seemingly random associations. In some respects, Naqoyqatsi is weirdly prescient - some of the editing choices feel almost entirely disconnected from the human touch, so alien that the filmmaking feels more like a prognosis of the AI image world we live in right now. Awful images morphing into more awful images by happenstance.

So yeah, in many ways this is incredibly fascinating. And I don't really take issue with a lot of the stuff that Reggio is doing here visually (if you've seen any of the things I've made, you know that I like to destroy an image), but fucking hell it's so goddamn boring.