Manufactured Landscapes (8 out of 10)

It occurred to me shortly after the previews ended and the projector started rolling: "By Odin's frosty beard, I am watching a movie called Manufactured Landscapes." You know in Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life, how long-lived angels are able to savor unappetizing-looking clumps of brown gook because their tastes have grown so advanced? This is how I felt. I must be a grown-up if I'm signing up for a 90-minute lecture on squalor photography.

This isn't the first movie to attempt audience hypnosis through a series of beautiful images and thudding music. There's the Qatsi trilogy of visual documentaries soundtracked to classic Philip Glass scores. Not everyone can get into them, but those who give it a try are usually spellbound by the 10th minute -- the waves of strange landscapes, evocative photos, otherworldly profiles fed to you gently with Glass's haunting string arrangements. Manufactured Landscapes is less ostentatious than those movies because it has an actual narrative. Photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent decades traveling Canada taking photos of mankind's use of nature. Oil rigs, quarries, highways, abandoned buildings. All matter of un-beautiful objects are captured by Burtynsky's cameras as the artist mulls over the connection between the plundering of nature and his ability to be a globe-trotting photographer. He sees oil getting pumped out of the ground and thinks of the gas in his car. He sees a silvery slick and he thinks of the silver that makes his photos possible.

The documentary focuses on Burtynsky's work in China, cataloguing the most rapid industrial growth in the history of mankind. When Mao died 30 years ago, only 10 percent of China was urbanized. Beijing central planners now expect 90 percent of the country to eventually be urbanized, and they have the power to do that, forcing people from their homes to make way for dams, paying them to dissemble their cities brick-by-brick. They know their citizens are pliant because the ones living in cities work in impossibly vast warehouses and factories and are practically delirious with corporate and civic pride. There's a great interview (only one of four in the film) with a factory employee who starts nervously talking about her job then asks if she can use some notes. When she pulls out the notes it's as if they were pre-written and approved by functionaries in the human resources department -- all boilerplate about how the company prides itself on success and had a long-term growth strategy.

I'm a capitalist, and I know that the lives of the factory drones presented in this movie are far brighter than the alternatives we see -- teens stomping through crude oil as they dissemble stranded tankers, rice farmers lazily looking over their crops. But I can't fake it: This is a haunting and depressing little movie.