Last and First Men

Rarely did the visuals match the story and music so I essentially listened to this. The score was nearly perfect and the story was quite compelling. As art, I liked it quite well. As a film, it wasn't very good. 36 hours later I'm still thinking about it.

Is there anything more chilling that the acknowledgment of own mortality?

I rarely watch arthouse films, and I seldom enjoy the few that I see. Yet somehow, I found myself captivated by this one. Partly because I had read Stapledon's book not too long ago, and been impressed by its vast scope. I found the strange way this film represents the story intriguing.

As others have said, on the surface this is 70 minutes of slow pans and zooms on strange concrete sculptures. The kind of style over substance that could easily be dismissed as pretentious navel-gazing. But for me, at least, it worked.

The core purpose of the visuals, I think, is to create a sense of alienation, of peering into a distant future world that we cannot fully grasp, through a medium - cross-time telepathy - that we are not built to comprehend. The film is made not as a story to be watched, but as if it were an actual telepathic message from the narrator, one of the last living men, waiting for the inevitable end of all of humanity in a future two billion years away.

This is not for everyone, and I won't disparage any of the 1 star reviews here. But if you "click" with what this film is trying to accomplish, it can be quite enjoyable.

I can't fault the people who like this one OR the people who don't. The writing is wonderful, and Tilda Swinton's narration is sonorous, but the visuals really add nothing, and the pacing is painfully slow.

Visually, we do get the sense of a dead planet. We get it hammered into us shot by excruciating shot for the entire duration of the film. It's rather fatiguing.

I don't want to argue with the people who like it. If you're so taken with the story that it kept you involved, then great. The film makers could have done a lot more with it. The visuals could have told much more of a story, even with keeping the same approach. Unfortunately, for me the experience was that of a half-hour audiobook crammed into an hours worth of a film.

I wouldn't really regard nor describe this as a film, but a great art installation piece. The music is fantastic & contemplative & complements the visuals completely & it does project you into another worldly experience along with the narration of Tulsa Swinton. Unsurprisingly it is mainly a vehicle for the composition of sounds & is surprisingly hypnotic. Best experienced BIG, DARK & LOUD.