‘Koyaanisqatsi’ Director Godfrey Reggio Unravels His New Odyssey ‘Once Within a Time’ Amid Humanity’s Accelerating Self-Destruction

variety.com:

J. Kim Murphy Stop reading if you’ve seen this movie before — a wooden mannequin with the face of Greta Thunberg greets a horde of kindergarteners emerging from a steampunk Trojan horse under a dome of gigantic smartphones bathing them in hot blue light.

Alright, keep scrolling. That singular image is one of the many goofy but eerie arrangements that Godfrey Reggio conjures in his newest odyssey, “Once Within a Time” — a dense, trance-inducing 43-minute feature that sees the “Koyaanisqatsi” director sounding the alarm on the technocratic foundations of our digital age. “No festival wanted this film,” Reggio tells Variety, smoking American Spirits and sporting a gray bushy beard while speaking on a Zoom call in his Sante Fe, N.M.

studio. “Not even Telluride, where they celebrated the 40th anniversary of ‘Koyaanisqatsi.’ They didn’t know what to make of it.” Perhaps the festivals could be forgiven, as implied meaning isn’t exactly the modus operandi for “Once Within a Time.” Reggio describes his new project with a series of paradoxes: “linear and nonlinear, clear and ambiguous at exactly the same time.” Without any dialogue, the film flutters between recognizable myths (The Garden of Eden!

The Tower of Babel! A giant robot battling the military in the desert!), unfurling a dreamy tapestry under a confetti blast of digital distortions.