koyaanisqatsi

The movie was initially pretty difficult for me to understand, but as I watched I began to fall into the rhythm of the music and the images. The juxtaposition of the beauty and majesty of nature with the harsh reality man has created startled me. It's as if man has refused to continue adapting to his environment and now wants the world to adapt to us. That's a very dangerous thing.

Because we live in the sterile environment that we've created for ourselves, it becomes difficult to see just how alien that landscape is. Koyaanisqatsi shocked me in that it gave me a new view of something very familiar. I know that in the documentary about the film one of the men said that these images were no longer startling, but I disagree. In high school, when we had one of those crazy schedule changes for a pep rally or an assembly or finals or testing, I often wondered to myself how long it would take an alien who was just observing our behavior to figure out what exactly was going on and how erratic our daily behavior must seem to an impartial eye. Koyaanisquatsi gave me the feeling of being that alien. It left me wondering how much sense there really is to our daily routine and the things we find important. How self-important we are to think that we can improve on nature. And how hard it would be for me to live without this modern technological environment in which I've been raised.

Nature is beautiful and powerful, but I couldn't survive in it. My dependence on this ugly, harsh technology scares me.