Home [Blu-ray]
No description available for this title.
Item Type: BLU-RAY DVD Movie
Item Rating: NR
Street Date: 06/05/09
Wide Screen: yes
Director Cut: no
Special Edition: no
Language: ENGLISH
Foreign Film: noSubtitles: no
Dubbed: no
Full Frame: no
Re-Release: no
Packaging: Sleeve”Former actor Yann Arthus-Bertrand directed this visually astonishing portrait of the Earth as seen from mesmerizing aerial views. Home is not the first documentary to survey our planet from the air, but Arthus-Bertrand brilliantly and dreamily captures the miraculous linkage within delicate eco-systems. For viewers whose eyes glaze over at descriptions of the way Earth recycles energy and matter, Home underscores the beautiful and awesome reality of that complex process. Narrated by actress Glenn Close (in this English-language version), Home begins by exploring and clarifying the natural history of water, sunlight, and the role simple life-forms such as algae played (and still play) in making the planet hospitable to more evolved, living things. As the film moves along, it also has a way of rebooting one’s lazy assumptions about familiar phenomena. The Grand Canyon, for example, might be a fantastic sight to behold, but it’s also a collection of billions and billions of shells compressed under Earth’s oceans long ago. The carbon trapped in the Grand Canyon was drained from the atmosphere, helping–once again–oxygen-dependent life to develop.
Similarly, plant life, Home tells us, broke up the water molecule and released oxygen into the atmosphere. Everything is linked, everything is part of a grand machine–the film makes this clear in scores of ways, and not just by telling us. Arthus-Bertrand reveals the intricate, breathtaking designs and patterns of glaciers feeding rivers, of animals feeding on plant life so more plant life can grow, of Australia’s great Coral Reef’s role in keeping the ocean in eco-balance. Of course, a big part of the story is the impact short-sighted humans have on these systems: the way we overfish, or drain deserts of scarce fossil water, or turn non-farming lands into perverse engines for agriculture. There is much to be alarmed at watching Home, but there is much to move one as well. –Tom Keogh “
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Visually most stunnig movie I have ever seen
This is visually most stunnig movie I have ever seen ! An hour and a half of complete assault on your senses ! Fascinating ! Jawdropping ! Startling ! Brilliant !
1 Stars Yes, it is propaganda
Oddly enough I share most of the messages the movie attempts to deliver. The photography is excellent and the art craftsmanship is superb. That said, the emotional propaganda is not the righteous and proper way to make the world better. The movie is not a balanced documentary. It leaves an after-taste of bad journalism.
I appreciate being lectured. Yet I choose and value lecturers which operate with verifiable facts and earn respect for the substance of their delivery more than for the beautiful packaging they put around. I do not see this is being the case with the movie.
As one of the commenters wrote, emotional stirring may have it’s value. However, blindly stirring an emotional pot is not a work of a professional artist in my book. When only uncalculated emotions are involved, an individual’s response is random, unpredictable. Works which are merely stirring up emotions are amateurish. A professional artist with strong ethic is capable of getting a calculated response in an educated population, among others. A calculated emotional message which resonates without knowledge foundation is an emotional manipulation. In my assessment “Home” is a very professional yet very manipulative work. For each individual image or sequence in the movie without the commentary I would give 5 starts. Yet, when combined, it creates a new work of art of a damaging quality for the cause as far as I am concerned. The reason is that it is based on a very pervasive visual material, yet uses very low standards for information used to form public opinion.
Overall, without going into further details, the message delivery in the movie fits precisely the Propaganda descriptions in Wikipedia.
5 Stars A Must!
First, make no mistake, this is a must-buy for anyone with a large-screen HDTV and Blu-ray player; it contains the most stunning cinematography and sharpest HD available for home use. Secondly, it carries a message that should make it required viewing in any format, on any screen.
That this is a film with a point of view is an understatement. The unrelenting gloom of the narrative during the first 90 minutes or so, playing behind some of the most stunningly beautiful views of earth ever committed to film, has led some to label it a propaganda film for environmentalists; and the film unfortunately encourages that charge by an unnecessarily preachy tone. The use of the second person, “You are changing the planet” versus “We are changing the planet” makes one wonder if the producers and narrator consider themselves not to be a part of the same human race whom they are addressing. Furthermore, although I am moderately environmentalist, I take issue with the assumption that nature is beneficent and that humans are the only thing standing in the way of nature. There are two things wrong with this view: (1) nature is often cruel and destructive, whether one looks at the evil inflicted by microscopic viruses or monstrous storms–man may in some cases make these phenomena worse, but man did not create them; and (2) humans are a major part of nature itself, not just some alien attacker.
The producers of the film do attempt to strike a balance during the last 20 minutes of the film by pointing out what some countries are doing to slow, halt, or reverse the damage to our planet; but for both sides of the environmental debate, these 20 minutes come as too little, too late. The narrator states that it is “too late for pessimism” after a film that predominantly leaves the impression that it is too late for optimism, that it is too late for hope of reversing the overwhelming momentum built up by overpopulation in developing countries and overconsumption in the richest countries. One can only hope that the movie overstates the catastrophe that is already well under way on our planet; but even if the film’s emphasis is skewed (I don’t think it is), even if statistics are used selectively to drive its point home (probably true to some extent), and even if it got a few facts wrong, if even half of what it shows is correct, this is one of the scariest films one could possibly see.
A review of this disc in terms of whether or not one should buy it, or at least rent it, could pretty much end here–just get it! If you simply can’t abide its message, either for political reasons, or just because you don’t want to ruin your day, then watch it with the sound turned off, at least for the first time through. But we ignore its message at our peril. (OK, now I sound preachy; but watch the film; too much of it is simply irrefutable.)
To put on a critical hat, however, there are several things wrong with this film and its packaging. First I have to point out an irony: the Blu-ray version of this film adds its own little bit of environmental damage, and I don’t refer to the natural resources required to produce and view it; these are more than justified by the positive impact it could have. Rather, I refer to the completely unnecessary and annoying use of Java to author this disk. This system prevents many or all Blu-ray players from being able to resume a video where the viewer left off; so if you want to watch half the film one day and the other half the next, you have to leave the player on, drawing a small amount of electricity, for as many hours or days over which you wish to spread your viewing. If you so much as press the stop button, you will not only have to wait through all the start-up loading (in several stages) and logos and piracy warnings, but also have to search for your place in the movie because not even a bookmarking function is provided. Many Blu-ray productions use Java to enable all sorts of bells and whistles, including interactivity over the Internet (”BD-Live”); but this disc has no special features; and I could see no benefit at all to the use of this obnoxious technology. To the producers: Use Java (make it do something worthwhile) or lose it!
This leads me to another curious thing about this production: lavish as the photography is, the product is otherwise skimpy, with no program booklet and no special features on the disc. This would not be so bad were it not for the fact that many of the interesting places filmed are not identified in the narrative or by titles, at least not until the very end, where it is done in retrospect. Much of this information is available on the Internet, at [...], an English-language version of the French site; but the “Home” Book itself is only in French. It’s impressive that the foundation made this very attractive and informative book available on-line with all its photography and charts intact, and you can begin to get a feel for the magnificence of the pictures right there. In addition, if you want to subject the film’s allegations to a fact-check, this book lays out its statistics. Even if you are like me, and know only a little bit of tourist French, I think you can decipher most of the book, which is also available for sale in hardcopy.
To be picky, there are lapses in the editing of the English narrative (faults that may not exist in the original French), with Close stating that there were no towns on Earth until 600 years ago. Huh? And she mispronounces several words, including “indefatigable,” “superfluous,” and “Qatar,” which leads me to hope that the fact checking was more thorough than the final edit of the English soundtrack. But I’m glad they saved money in these aspects rather than in the filming itself, which, I cannot repeat often enough, is spectacular; and even if a few factual errors may have slipped in, the bulk of the information is fascinating, shocking, and vital.
5 Stars AMAZING
Home its one of the most “powerful” documentaries i ve ever seen…With the beautiful musical score and the stunning aerial photography (you should see it on blu-ray - glorious high definition, you cannot imagine it by watching it on dvd) it hypnotizes you for 2 hours..its gripping stuff!!It trully capticates you and make much more concerned about earth and its future…our future…Also a very good narration by Glenn Close…
When i watched PLANET EARTH, i didnt expect to see images like that again…but when i watched Home, i found out i was wrong…9/10
1 Stars Mute button on standby
If you are the type of person that doesn’t like to be lectured, avoid this video.
While the photography was quite good, the non-stop enviro-badgering had me turning off
the T.V. half way through. I learned that we should protect the environment from the
type of people that would waste precious natural resources making this show….
Filed under: Blue Ray Movie Reviews