Samsara

So, I had wanted to see this film since seeing the trailer at the theater a couple months back and knew that I had to experience this movie on the big screen. It's the 'first feature film since the 70's to be shot entirely on 70mm film'. The movie has earned about $2 million so far despite being released in only 70 theaters.

The movie does not have a narrative and is instead a series of images gathered from around the world over the course of five years.

I enjoyed that there was no agenda to the selection of images, or at least there wasn't an apparent one. Everything was amazingly beautiful and most of the imagery was from countries other than America. There also really didn't appear to be much connection between the images. There was no intended message other than the wonder that is our world.

The images were just ridiculously beautiful. The crazy shots in some of the sequences must've taken ages to set up and some of them I can't even wrap my head around how they got the angles they got. I enjoyed the fact that they didn't just set up a tripod in a foreign country and shoot. They mapped out their shots and got loads of overhead crane and dolly shots. As much as I enjoyed the rolling crane shots, it did become a bit repetitive by the end because they used pretty much the same two angles for every image. I would have liked a little more variety considering I was basically watching a slideshow for 1.5 hours. The score was a little cheesy for my taste.

Well considering that the people selected to be in the shots just stared at the camera as it moved closer, they did a great job. Again, that got a bit repetitive.

So overall, it was 'an experience'. I don't think it can be appreciated on anything other than the big screen. It was a little awkward to sit in pretty much silence for that long inside the theater, and as much as I wanted to get into this film, I did find myself a tiny bit bored due to the repetitiveness of the shots. But even still, it deserves tons of respect for the work and determination it took to get this thing completed.