Ok. So why do I like this flick so much? Well, it appeals to me on a lot of different levels.

First off, the music is great. The music director took various styles from different cultures and merged them into a new meaning of “world music“. During one scene, he uses a mixture of Japanese Taiko drums, Scottish bagpipes, and Tibetan horns. Yeah, it works! My favorite part of the whole movie is a tribal chant that had me mesmerized, both audibly and visually. Another reason to love this film is the sheer beauty of many of the locations. Think in terms of a National Geographic photo shoot that moves! Third, it has scenes of the best real-life examples of strange attractors I have seen yet. They use time-lapse photography to give you a sped-up view of traffic, crowds, and assembly line workers. The workers go through the same motions over and over again, but they are never repeated in exactly the same way like a looped recording would be. It isn’t random, but it’s not predictable either. You can say that you have a pattern of the hand moving here, then here, then here, but you can’t say with any certainty exactly when and where they hand will be at any given moment. Imagine that this graphic plots out the motion of the hand in 3D-space. See how the points flow around areas they seem to be attracted to? They never have the same position and vector; otherwise they would become a predictable repeating pattern. I laughed out loud when I realized what I was seeing! Watching the traffic/crowd patterns was truly hypnotizing.

All was not pretty, however. The middle third was the most powerful, but also the most disturbing. Amid the scenes of traffic, crowds, and assembly lines was a look at cute little yellow chicks on conveyor belts being handled like cheap little toys. They were dropped, flung about, injected, and had their beaks hot-knifed on their way to becoming battery hens. The thing I liked about this part is that they simply show it with no overt message. If someone who eats chicken is disturbed when they watch this, it’s not because of any external voice. There are also views of Poland and Cambodia that really hit the gut. Please don’t let this stop you from watching the movie, though. It really is well sectioned into thirds. You can simply jump ahead a half-hour once you see the rainforest tree come down if you really need to. The front and back thirds are much more about the beauty and wonders of the various places and cultures of the world.