  Hey, everyone. I finally got Koyaanisqatsi back from Netflix today and I watched it. Impressive movie if not unusual.
This movie is the first part of what became known as urlLink The Qatsi Trilogy . Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning 'life out of balance'. It also means 'life in turmoil', 'life disintegrating', and 'a state of life that calls for another way of living. ' Thinking of our own world, today, it can definately speak for it. I was getting ready for a traditional documentary when I popped this into my DVD player but instead I got 87 minutes of video footage (footage shot for the movie and stock footage) and early 80s synthesized midi music and absolutely no dialogue (this is why it was interesting/unusual).
This movie starts out by showing you serene landscapes from the western deserts of the United States. Beautiful and breathtaking views mountains and rock formations, fissures in the earth spewing gasses and steam showing pristine wilderness. Suddenly, we're taken immediatly into a scene where our pretty landscape is interrupted by blasting. Rock and earth thrown by heavy dynamite charges. Huge earth movers come in and interrupt getting way for buildings or a highway. Huge metal towers holding electric lines for miles. We are taken gradually from our nature landscapes and thrown into our urban cityscapes riddled with polution and smog.
Unseemly skylines full of buildings and streets crammed with people and traffic. I've been to many large cities in my life and I have never seen cities and urban sprawl quite like what I was seeing. Cities full of life played in fast forward so you can get the idea of the growth that human civilization has become over the last couple hundred years. This movie takes you out of the box that is our civilization and forces us to look back into the box and see what human endeavor has done.
We have taken ourselves away from nature that had produced humanity, bulldozed it over and created a 'new nature'; an urban nature; a way of living that is opposite of nature. This movie takes us to the city streets. In fast-forward, we see cars and people stop and go by the millions in what is seen as an busy cycle of life. People come and go and the flow of people never slow down. Life is busy and people hurry to get from one place to another. We are taken into a factory where our food is not grown, but processed. We have people using huge metal machines create cars so that we can be busy, productive human beings doing unnatural things in an unnatural world.
What is so interesting is that these are scenes of normal, everyday metropolises. Normal people going about their normal lives. The presentation takes you out of that environment and shows it to you as if you've never been there before and you become completely aware of the follies of mankind. In essence, what this movie tells you (without the use of words, amazingly) is that human beings have separated themselves from nature.
We have destroyed our symbiotic relationship with our planet and have literally created a new one: one of technology. You can even go as far as to say that this movie is a call to action of humans worldwide(without actors or dialogue, this movie is viewable by people of all ages and languages). It's a message that tells us that we are literally destroying it. However with the huge barrage of images of the advancement of technology, it would seem that there is no going back. What people have done to this world is permanent. However, there seems to be also a message of hope.
While we see images of what technology does to us, it should help us to keep your minds geared towards what is important. While we use technology to help us live, technology is not responsible for life. Nature is responsible for life and try not to lose focus on it. I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. It would have had more but the musical score was a bit too much for me. It was ambient and followed the flow of the movie perfectly, but since this movie was released in 1983, I can't blame the movie for being dated. It was mostly synthesized midi and at times got a bit annoying if not hypnotic but still flowed with the movie. This movie was directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio and the executive producer is Francis Ford Coppola.
I enjoyed watching this movie. It left me feeling a little depressed at the end, which I guess is what Reggio wanted to leave you. I've got a new outlook on urban life. It's not as great as I once thought it was (I remember going to NYC for the first time and was mesmerized by how busy it was and that it never slowed down for anyone).
I've seen the images and I felt embarrassed for the first time for being a human being. I'd recommend this movie to everyone. It pertains to us all as people. We live in a world where resources could run scarce if not incredibly expensive to have (think to our own little gas crisis we had just last month...if you wanted to call that a crisis. It was not nearly as bad as the gas crisis in the 1970s). I enjoy the technology we have and it pains me to think that we destroy our world every day for the advancement of technology. I'd love to think that I could throw it all away and live without it but we can't. Our world is now such that we have to use technology so that we can do something so simple as eat or take a shit or even sleep.
After the movie, it felt to me that humanity was doomed. But watch the movie and judge for yourself. Coming soon: Powaqqatsi , the second part of urlLink "The Qatsi Trilogy" . 
