The Village Voice reviews The Unforeseen
The Village Voice has mentioned The Unforeseen twice before, once for Human Rights Watch Festival and then for Sundance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But with the film’s true NY release happening in a few days, it has just written its first true review. Here are a few highlights from it…
True, The Unforeseen—a haunting meditation on hubris and the folly of claiming rights over something as elemental (and temperamental) as the environment—can be seen as part of a small but growing canon of ecological-alarm documentaries, a genre broad and urgent enough to encompass the PowerPoint apocalypse of An Inconvenient Truth, the countdown-to-Armageddon jeremiad of The 11th Hour, and the mountaintop-removal broadside of Black Diamonds. But the qualities that make The Unforeseen ineffective as a shrieking call to arms—among them a tone that’s less hectoring than contemplative, and an unusual sympathy for the opposition—make it vastly more absorbing as a movie…
…the movie’s glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft—not to mention its atypical visual splendor. The idea for the film came from executive producer Terrence Malick, himself a longtime Austinite, and cinematographer Lee Daniel’s texture-besotted HD/Super 16 imagery evokes the rapturous transcendentalist quality that surfaces in Malick’s own films: the weight of rain on grass, the play of magic-hour light on a creek. Through its transfixing glimpses of the natural world and an agrarian lifestyle at risk, The Unforeseen ponders nothing less than what happens when we turn our backs on the divine.
This well-written review emphasizes aspects no other reviewer has. Read the entire review here.
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About The Unforeseen
The Unforeseen, executive produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Called "the best film at the festival, hands down" by Film Comment's Gavin Smith, the film documents the struggles between development and preservation of Austin Texas.