Powaqqatsi celebrates humans over technology and has a warmth that the first film lacks. There are dozens of beautiful faces in this show - kids, men, women, and wizened oldsters of every race and origin. We see them at work, happily at first. There is a section in the first third where every cut, from a circle of women threshing wheat to the spinning skirts of an Andean dancer, is so beautiful one cannot help but exclaim out loud. Man is shown to be able to live practically anywhere: crammed into stilt houses around any body of water, on remote islands, in the middle of deserts and on the tops of mountains. An Indian mud village, with its painted stucco walls, is orange and immaculate-looking; the ritual costumes of Africans, Indians, and Andeans become a collage of color and diversity and pride.

The imagery is then subverted by the ugliness of modern reality, with its endless ore-cars, regimented native troops, grim and grimy sweatshops, and roads shared by vehicular traffic and barefoot, rickety-legged men with impossible loads on their backs. There are images here that burn into the memory: a kid who couldn't be more than seven beating the ox that pulls his huge cart, while his father tries to rest beside him. Tons of rocks and garbage pour into a bay, possibly being dumped as landfill. A hundred toothpicks sticking out of an abstract grid are revealed to be a sideways shot of laundry hung from highrise windows, as a jet passes at an impossible angle. A kid in Hong Kong marvels at the beauty of dozens of superimposed neon signs. A brief shot of soot-covered men carrying heavy loads up soot-covered stairs in a hellish, smoking work yard is a more potent image of brute labor than anything in Metropolis. Television is reduced to a constantly morphing display of commercial goods, rapturous faces, and violent weapons, becoming the Hopi Powaqq - an evil, seducing sorcerer that sucks the lifeforce of other entities to further its own life.

Unlike the abstract Koyaaniskatsi, opposing content is used to form new meanings and messages with a decided political intent. The author's contrast of victims and oppressors becomes all too clear and rather strident here, with blasts of music accompanying huge closeups of 'oppressed' men staring down the camera with accusing, bitter eyes. One little black boy holds up two fists defiantly, but trembles - with fear?. A bejeweled woman in a sari holds her child and gazes seemingly right into our souls.

A very spiritual man, Reggio concludes Powaqqatsi with an extended lento passage, returning to natural images, especially water, to end on an endorsement of faith as the true center of human value. The face of a toothless shaman, smiling in rapture, mixes with the almost perfect reflections in an Indian river. It's a return to calm and peace that becomes a visual meditation on the fate of mankind. Whether the show's theme is an oversimplification is debatable ... other minds would argue that the idyllic lifestyles of primitive peoples were long ago spoiled by ovepopulation, disease, war and slavery, and without benefit of modern technology. And there's plenty of arguments for man's spiritual diversity being warped into fundamentalist oppression. Powaqqatsi is a poem, not a coherent political treatise.

Powaqqatsi is perhaps the highpoint of Philip Glass' musical output. The score isn't dominated by hypnotic synthesizer noodlings and weird dissonant Invaders from Mars-like choral effects. There's instead a whole range of music stylings, much of it suggested by rhythms and instruments from the Third World, and often rising to a pitch that drives the images on screen instead of simply accompanying them.

Powaqqatsi looks even better than its predecessor because so much of it is pristine original camera footage shot by high speed cameras. MGM's generous compression brings it all out in breathtaking detail and sparkling color. Sometimes we wish there were optional subtitles saying where individual shots were filmed, as scenes jump from continent to continent with abandon. It's like 50 volumes of National Geographic images, arranged as that company would never arrange them. Godfrey Reggio is again fascinating in his 'raving', and it's best to just listen and let his ideas flow over you than to try and decipher each phrase as you hear it - You don't talk to Godfrey, man, you listen to him. He doesn't stress the relationship, but this is clearly the work of a spiritual man of faith: he says his dozen or so years in a monastery ended decades ago, but that's still the man he is.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Koyaanisqatsi rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Interview docu, trailers
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 14, 2002