I had heard this film was a study of a landscape photographer's art by presenting the beauty in man's deconstructing the natural landscape. It certainly showed the laborious activities to find locations, setup shots, and capture stark images whose final destinations were art studios worldwide. Put together in moving pictures it is truly a horror show.This film oozes by you supplanting the shock of ghastly images with gentle waves of a wonderful industrial soundtrack that guides you like on slow moving river. Each sequence stands on its own, but in combination you get deeper and deeper into the feeling of overwhelming inevitability. There are few words, this allowing the grandeur in what is shown to preach in its own way. An awful, massive factory filled with human automata who live in hopelessly lifeless dormitories. Individuals dying early while rummaging for recyclable scraps in mountains of our E-waste. The birthing of gigantic ships and their destruction by hand in giant graveyards. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest industrial project in human history and likely for all time. The time lapse as a city dies and is simultaneously reborn into a replica of modernity that purposefully destroys all relics of the culture that was.The most terrifying image for me was a dam engineer explaining that the most important function of the dam was flood control. The shot shifts to the orchard behind the spokesperson where you witness the level of the last flood by the toxic water having eaten the bark from the trees, demonstrating that nothing but the most hideous vermin could be living in the waters.The obvious not being stated is far more powerful than your normal preachy Save the Earth documentaries. The artist Edward Burtynsky explains the method wonderfully. 'By not saying what you should see … many people today sit in an uncomfortable spot where you don't necessarily want to give up what we have but we realize what we're doing is creating problems that run deep. It is not a simple right or wrong. It needs a whole new way of thinking'. The subtlety of this descends into an either/or proposition, but the film images scream that the decision has very much been made in favor of the dark side.Though never stated directly in any way, as the waves of what you witness wash away from your awareness and you contemplate, there is only one conclusion possible … we are doomed. The progress of mankind that is inexorable from our natures leaves behind carnage that this artist finds terrifying beauty in. What he is actually capturing are the tracks of we the lemmings rushing unconsciously toward our own demise. Unlike most films with environmental themes, this one ends with no call to arms. It argues basically what's the point, but makes certain you place the blame properly on all of us equally.

Beginning with its long opening shot of seemingly endless rows of assembly line workers in a Chinese factory, Manufactured Landscapes attempts to show the devastating impact of industrialization on the natural environment and traditional societies. Its droning narrative assumes that industrial development in China and elsewhere is entirely unprecedented, as if there had never been an industrial revolution in Europe and America and Karl Marx had never visited the British Museum. That there might be a connection between the present-day Asian drive for industrialization and wealth and earlier experiences of starvation and terror is never mentioned.At the same time, there's an effort to present Edward Burtynsky's photographs of industrial waste as somehow "beautiful". Much of the film is a slide show of these images. They are well produced, of museum size, and have apparently appeared in several exhibitions. To me, however, they only demonstrate that almost any photograph can be made to appear beautiful if well presented. Industrial waste is still industrial waste. The relationship, if any, between the photographs and the film's spoken message remains unclear.I don't mean to imply that there aren't real and sometimes desperate problems when countries rush to industrialize. Manufactured Landscapes, however, offers only strange and bitter hopelessness. It's like a two-hour lecture by Noam Chomsky. Maybe it has some value as a demonstration of what's wrong with the American (and Canadian) Left.

I have mixed feelings on this film. On the one hand the images are stunning, desolate and beautiful. The photographer proves there can be beauty even in ecological devastation, which is really a foreign concept. The segments on the Three Gorges Dam and the shipbreaking beach in Bangladesh are fascinating.On the other hand, the film often is a slide show of images without narration. When that happens it seems very, VERY slow. I know the director probably wants us to be able to absorb these images without being distracted by narration, but it makes for a mind numbing experience.In the "special features" there was lots of fascinating narration - if they had added this to the film I would have enjoyed it more.

I have been an admirer of Edward Burtynsky's work for years, and it was such a pleasure to be able to see the man at work, thanks to Jennifer Baichwal's documentary. The severe beauty of the ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh, the stone quarry in Vermont, the enormous assembly plant in China, the beleaguered old neighbourhoods in Shanghai that are just waiting to be torn down: these landscapes are captured so well by the photographer and the filmmaker.At times I thought of old TV documentaries on abandoned coal mines and plastic-mold factories; the sort of stuff I grew up watching. Burtynsky's work has the great value of pointing out how the industrial activity has only shifted to Asia, it has not stopped. The strangest scene for me was the computer scrap-yard somewhere in China--the waste had a threatening air about it, while the workers were very jovial.