Awaken

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.

Don't expect a masterpiece of cinematic acting... But, if you're sitting 3m in front of a 77" OLED TV and additional a 5.1.4 Soundsystem... damn, just enjoy the pictures and the sound, and, if available, enjoy your illegeal... thoughts!

As a devoted follower of Reggio's work, I have rewatched his latest film countless times, yet I find myself struggling to fully embrace it. The final quarter of the documentary is undoubtedly compelling, but it's also somewhat vexing. The film places an excessive amount of emphasis on youth and women, neither of which have any real bearing on the film's central theme. In contrast, Reggio's earlier masterpiece, Koyaanisqatsi, was more impactful because it focused on the essence of what truly matters. To put it bluntly, this particular work is a complete dud.

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.

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.