groovyuniverse Watching this in 2016 i realized that the industrious images shown in this documentary are ten years old. All the people you see have gone somewhere, developed, aged, some died. They are all shown as tiny cogs in this man-made machine that's called industrialization, mostly seen in the specific context of China, early 21st century. You see them doing monotonous work in the most efficient way, Marx' nightmare, barren landscapes ravaged by pollution, cities being destroyed for a new dam.It's a sombre portrait that doesn't forget the human factor. The shot of a lone man in a giant factory sleeping at his workbench after everybody left is typical, sad and beautiful at once. These and other images made me emotional, without being forced to feel that way. The film tells you that the scope and character of what you are seeing is unprecedented in history. It has an eye for the innate bizarre-ity of the shapes created in industrialization, captured in beautiful photographs that regularly show up. There is commentary, yet sparsely, a loose narrative of the films' creative process and some musing about the way how we as humankind transform nature. It's an intellectual take on industrialization, instead of immediately jumping to condemnation. Pessimism still prevails though, and by witnessing what the filmmakers witnessed it's hard to disagree with them. The music was the only thing that disrupted my attention at times. It's a dark form of Ambient that can be too present in wanting you to feel depressed about what was being shown. It's not needed, the sounds of the locations themselves are interesting enough by themselves.

TheBlueHairedLawyer I love pollution, and polluting things on purpose. There's nothing more wonderful than seeing the silhouette of a smokestack at sunset, or the smell of coal, or the sound of heavy manufacturing.I was really hoping that this would be in favor of pollution, and ended up really disappointed. As usual, it's subtle but still typical anti-pollution propaganda, environmental extremism at one of its lowest points.I'm sure my review will be voted down by countless people, especially with my point of view on pollution, but I've never cared about the planet and I would at least like some free speech on the matter.As I should have expected, it had the typical enviro-message of alarmists everywhere: "the planet is certainly doomed and it's all your fault unless you help get rid of pollution".Typical.My advice (if you still want it), if you want to be a smart person, whether you're against pollution or not, watch A Plague on Our Children, Gasland, Beyond Pollution and Lois Gibbs: the Love Canal. Afterwards, watch The Great Global Warming Swindle, Mine Your Own Business: the Dark Side of Environmentalism, Not Evil Just Wrong and Fracknation. It's the best way to see points of view from both environmentalists and eco-sinners with the least amount of biased information. Don't watch this, it's just a load of hippie extremism.

NetflixZZZZ Mesmerizing, breathtaking and horrifying, this hauntingly beautiful film is the "Apocalypse Now" without fiction. Slow in pace, quiet in mood, it gives good glimpses of the poisoned patches of Earth that may well be signs of an inevitable doom.There is no doubt in my mind -- the nature is plagued and we are the disease. Greed, the very essence of humanity that drives evolution and progress, has turned us into something like cancer, on its way to consume the host and die with it...Manufactured Landscapes is quite an unforgettable viewing experience - at least I'll never regard my toaster and iron the same way again.

Roedy Green The documentary opens with a pan inside a Chinese factory that seems to go on for hours and hours. The enormity of the factory is unbelievable. It is packed with young Chinese people all in bright yellow uniforms.Later you see swarms of these yellow-uniformed young people forced to line up in rows like school children, where they are chastised for insufficient production. It is like an enormous prison or an ant hill. You wonder, what happens to these people when they hit 25. The movie does not answer.There are many other scenes of Chinese industry, from container docks, shipyards, mines, and a coal mine far as the eye can see past mists on the horizon.There is almost no narration. What little there is is often in Chinese with subtitles. And the cameraman tries to find an artistic beauty in the piles of industrial waste.Another scene that stuck in my mind was the manual processing of North America's e-waste. Every computer is smashed into components, every little pin on every chip pulled off one by one and all the metals sorted, all by hand in filthy conditions, surrounded in lead, cadmium, mercury and other dangerous heavy metals that have so contaminated the ground water it is poisonous.The movie offers no political or environmental commentary but to me China is clearly on the wrong track. They are building a new coal-fired plant each week. They are trying to convert from 90% rural to 70% urban with frantic building of high rises. It is as if they have plugged their ears to the coming realities -- peak oil and global climate change.Instead they need to move food production and consumption closer together. They need buildings that don't require energy -- highly insulated, no more than 7 stories high so people can climb stairs rather than rely on elevators.The movie also showed an old oil tanker being taken apart by hand in Bangladesh. Children and teens swim in the crude oil sludge to collect the dregs. Nobody lives past 30 in this occupation.The movie spells out no explicit message, but the implicit one is that our life style depends on an almost prison-like culture in the third world and scarring of the earth on a stupendous scale.Much of the sound track reminds me of some rhythmic squeaky mechanical device that needs oil. It drives you almost insane. I imagine many people will walk out of this movie because of it. I think the director is trying to condition you to find the images repulsive. She overdoes it.The experience is much like being a child. You see all manner of strange machines and activities, almost nothing explained. It overwhelms with awe and dread.I think this movie would be best viewed on DVD, where you can turn down the sound, and the images will not be so overwhelmingly depressing.