Warning: do not watch Home documentary if you wish to remain ignorant, bored, and distracted by the unimportant minutiae of our current lifestyle. In other words, enjoy the film and allow the beauty and truths to permeate deep into your heart and mind.
The shots in Home documentary are absolutely stunning and will leave you breathless. Slowly moving scenes from far away illuminate the grandeur of our home planet. The poetic narration will sweep you away from your everyday life and immerse you deep in the cosmic mystery of life and the grand scope of eons. The musical backdrop perfectly accentuates the wondrous and intricate beauty that the film portrays.
Most importantly, it points out the many ways that our global ecosystem works. We are reminded—as we should be—that the dynamic balance of our world exists. Then, we are reminded—once again by Home—just how disruptive our human activities, which have been amplified by prosthetic technologies, have been and are. We are reminded that we see around ourselves is not normal, even though it may unconsciously seem so. Recent technological developments are only hundreds or thousands of years old and are dwarfed when compared to the few billion years during which the earth has formed and changed.
We know nothing, or, more accurately, next to nothing. The vast mystery of the planet is time and time again glimpsed. It is humbling. It is accurate. That is another strength of the film. Many times we are made to glory in the vast achievements of humanity. We have computers, the Internet, cars, cameras, clocks, guns, penicillin, and atomic explosions. These are all smashing achievements, but when we look at the big picture, they have all been fairly recent and immensely disruptive. In fact, they have been so disruptive that desertification, depletion of aquifers, rapid species extinction, and climate change now threatens not only the survival of the entire ecosystem, but the sustainable survival of humanity itself.
This film flows between scenes rife with unbelievable cinematography. Each picture is worth a thousand words, and that makes Home documentary contain veritable libraries of information, each bit and byte floating subtly on the pixels of my monitor and deep in the recesses of my mind. It defies explanation. I really cannot recommend it so much. In a way, it is a purgative to the Western toxin that had seeped deep into my bones, muscles, mind, and cells. It calls loud like the voice of the prophets, declaring that we must change our paradigm to something more sustainable.
By bringing us through history from before time to the present day, I am struck with an immense intensity by just how quickly things have begun going so wrong. I see skyscrapers thrust up from the earth like strange metal trees. I see smokestacks and pillars of fire pointing up at the sky like the barrels of guns complete with the leap of flame that volcanically erupts when the gun fires. Perhaps that is actually what these immense towers are, at least once you factor in the carbon dioxide that is emitted to power these skyscrapers.
These are just some of my thoughts that have been provoked by Home documentary, this very thought provoking film. You might have similar thoughts, or you might have very different ones. The important thing is that you owe it to yourself, to this planet, and to human and non-human posterity to see this film and soak it in. The shift in consciousness needed to begin the building of a sustainable civilization is immense, but it is not impossible. It must be undertaken, sooner rather than later. Home documentary reminds us that “in nature, everything is linked.” Now, become visually and poetically aware of it.