Awaken

This does contain a substantial amount of incredibly beautifully shot time-lapse footage and that is clearly the strongest aspect of the production. Unfortunately it does also feel derivative and superficial, at times even fake compared to some of the classics in this genre like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka that it is clearly influenced by. It feels a bit like it is half way between those and Ashes and Snow to me. The parts portraying European cultures are clearly just role-play taking us at least a hundred years back.

One can't help but notice the almost total absence of older and the strong focus on young women. Life on earth ends up being portrayed as more of an endless party instead of the social commentary you get in something like Le Syndrome du Titanic or the spiritual-naturistic message of Samsara that you see the remnants of in the way which this imitates Fricke's works. On the audio side the soundtrack is not bad but not at the level of Philip Glass or Michael Stearns while (thankfully very limited) narration offered by Liv Tyler is even more out of place here than in Terence Malick's Voyage of Time. The sound effects should have been left out.

Overall I still enjoyed the beauty of it and I always love seeing new entries in this genre. My review's tone probably seems really harsh considering that but that is just due to the standard set by Ron Fricke and others.

Sorry but this is pretty much the stuff that I see from 100's of timelapse and nature videographers that post daily on Vimeo and Youtube. I think Malick sponsored this as a favor to one of his fans-turned-Broll photographers. Anyone can roll 100's of hours of footage with a digital camera these days and find something to edit from out of it. This was not the case some years ago, and it shows, with more careful projects which this was clearly trying to copy, (See the great Baraka, for example). I think Malick's involvement got better music to edit to than otherwise would have been, and got it out to at least basic streaming, but you'd never see this in a theater when it's all, basically, available free and honestly, gets pretty boring fast. The fans of this are mostly camera techs and other nature photo guys who are likely the ones voting this up.

Meditative piece, relaxing, calming, inspiring, full of wonderful visuals. Makes you appreciate our Earth and the diversity all around more. I enjoyed watching this unique work and would like to see more stuff like this being made! I am giving it 10 stars because there was nothing bad about it.

P. S. Don't expect action, drama or any specific storyline. It is not a typical Hollywood movie.

It doesn't really have anything to say except we went on a trip and took some pretty pictures in slow motion, and we got a cool new drone.

It's essentially a magazine pictorial, all lens flares and "let's do it again with a reflector panel", no natural location sound etc etc, without any insightful comments and nothing really hanging it all together aside from some early 21st century camera features, the aforementioned slow mo, timelapse, and drone footage. That was cool last century, but is that enough any more? We've all got it on our phones these days.

The real skill these days is having something to say with the footage, and it's a skill missing from this film outside of, 'pretty'.

I doubt Malick had much involvement in this outside of lending his name to it, although his recent output does share the same visual over content failing of this piece.

I tried to watch this at normal speed first, than I was annoyed at the slow mo and timelapses. I speed things up until I reach x3 speed, and still it was too slow and couldn't continue watching it. I stopped after 15min.

If you like timelapses, repetitive images and slow motion and zen music, it's a good movie for you but I prefer Samsara 10000x better than this.