Review of The New World (2005) by H. Paul M — 02 Sep 2010

There is the cliche of remarking that you?ve just seen the best movie ever made. It?s usually a moment of adrenaline or fashion-consciousness, and the grandeur is eclipsed by your next favorite movie, a few months or weeks down the line.

Being fully aware of that cliche, I will say for myself that I invoked it recently for The New World, but here?s the exception: I have been reserving that distinction for a film called Koyaanisqatsi since my mid-teens. Given the intervening two decades of nothing much to rattle me, this film is an absolute epiphany on the scale of literally improving the vernacular of cinema.

Whenever I had to defend my answer ?Koyaanisqatsi? to puzzled looks after the innocent question, ?What?s your favorite movie??, it always involved the inevitable failure to describe what it?s actually about. There haven?t been many like it (aside from the subsequent two sequels in its trilogy, and the ?spinoffs? by its cinematographer in Baraka and Chronos), though Koyaanisqatsi arguably shook the ground that moviemaking is built on even today. The closest populist reference to the style of Koyaanisqatsi is stop-motion photography of landscapes, such as unnaturally fast-moving clouds across the desert. And of course, there was the ?minimalist?/maximalist music of Philip Glass.

Some have tried to call this ?environmental cinema.? If they were referring to the existence of pretty vistas, they were missing the point. Much like minimalism in the development of contemporary music in the late 20th Century, cinema found a language that moderated its attention down to context and pulse. Storytelling through moving pictures has usually not been so attentive. Largely this is a humanistic instinct, which isn?t all bad. We are drawn to stories that enlarge the human experience ? ultimately a harmless dishonesty that fakes some kind of order to human behavior. But the braver thing to do is to depict ? as a first priority ? man and woman within their environment, between humans and non-humans, and between humans and other human civilizations. The storytelling that manifests from such a paradigm will lack in personal drama what it makes up for in a rich experience of ?thinking and moving? pictures.

Looking back on the title belt of Koyaanisqatsi within my little world of all-time favorites, I can see now why The New World rattled me so well. The two films? agendas and esthetics are one in the same ? the closest genre to these ironically is science fiction, which can, at its best, evoke the awe of realizing that humans dwell within something dramatically more important, and too important to understand. Better to make your point by observing that truth with humility, than to wrap things up with a slick cut and a thud! After seeing The New World, I literally doubted my ability to see any other film the same way again. That is a ?review? sounding like hyperbole, but sometimes you just wake up to something totally right. The New World is the greatest film ever made.