Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Awesome Movie

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The documentary began with a terrific starting scene and it succeeds in slapping the face of the people watching over time. With great scenes and important messages, he draws audiences in the presence of beautiful music without narrator. Time is passing so fast and you are stunned at the end of the documentary. Without question, I can say the best documentary I have ever seen.

Shot in well over twenty countries, filmed in what seems to be each and every continent, Baraka is an epic quest of humanity, nature, spirituality, and beautiful photography. Proudly showing off a variety of unique and visually astonishing techniques, Baraka is a technical marvel on every front. The cinematography is filled with exuberance, color, and unbelievable skill. The people and places visited are fascinating in there own right, and everything is made all the more mysterious, and therefore all the more fascinating, due to the lack of narration, narrative, convention, or even any spoken words. Everything is communicated through visuals and music, and whatever it is that is being communicated surpasses the power, depth, and intrigue of almost any film that utilizes the spoken word at all.

One of the best films to watch and one of the most extraordinary direction of photography that the twentieth century left us. The ability to tell stories only with images and their sounds is amazing. A classic film before the digital era that can not leave anyone indifferent. A masterpiece.

It was Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz who observed that "it's judgement that defeats us". Many people felt that Baraka should have given more details of what you were looking at and why instead of only presenting images. But all the locations are listed at the end, it's easy enough to find out which location is where and any history behind it. Baraka is a film that shows you life, a wide spread of life, and presents it without judgement. This is what happens, this is what is going on in the world of 1992; what you make of that, think about it, feel about it, do about it - that's up to you.That's not to say that there isn't a certain amount of guiding going on. The central message being sent to us is a simple one - we're all the same really. Shots of various religions kissing venerated objects follow each other, shots of a Yakuza full body tattoo cuts to tribal body decoration. Everywhere people stare into the camera. There is no attempt to tell us their thoughts, their backgrounds, their lives. The point is to wonder.What you take from Baraka will be personal to you. Some parts you will remember better than others. You may return to it at different times in your life and find different things. You might watch it two days in a row and find different things. Indeed, the scale of the film is such that it really requires repeat viewings, there are simply too many images to digest first time through. And images is what Baraka is all about, each one a living photograph. Fans of Edward Burtynsky will be immediately at home here in some of the vast landscapes and the Asian assembly lines. Each individual scene is so precisely tracked, time-lapsed, composed or lit that it could stand alone. If there's one initial criticism of Baraka, it might be that 90 minutes of this is just too much. Repeated viewings remove this obstacle, however.Baraka was made in 1992, so already parts of it are lost to us. Kowloon Walled City, which appears only briefly, underwent demolition within a year of the film's release. The burning oil fields in Kuwait was a current political event. How stunning these images are to us today, but how much more so in 100 years? Really a film like Baraka ought to be made every 10 years, to help us look at ourselves and evaluate what we are and what we're doing.My personal answer is yes, absolutely. Though it was high-definition before high definition existed and many of the scenes and images are now familiar, a great many still are not. Familiar scenes may even give us respite, which allows the in between moments to hit us still harder. Scenes of homeless children sleeping against hot air vents, or of a burning corpse at a Ganges cremation, or of tiny chicks being dispassionately sorted and flung through disinfected steel machinery, having their beaks scorched and ending up as battery hens. Much of Baraka is beautiful. Some is unpleasant, some is uncomfortable, some is amusing. Often there is beauty in the sadness, or sadness in the beauty. Baraka is life; make of it what you will.