By Brooke Shuman
Huffington Post
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” a documentary by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky, is a nature story gone awry, a dazzling and at times nauseating document of the far-reaching, and possibly catastrophic, impact that humans have had on the planet.
The film gets its title from the geological term “Anthropocene,” which was first coined in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer. In 2016, a group of geologists called the Anthropocene Working Group proposed that our planet has recently been so drastically altered by human activity that we are now living in a distinct geological era. (That’s why it’s called the Anthro-pocene, because humans made it.) Humans had been getting by in the Holocene epoch for 11,000 years since the last glacial age, but the Anthropocene Working Group claims that through farming, industrialization, massive excavation of minerals and the dumping of ton after ton of trash, we’ve created a new geological era.
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Read MoreBy Robert Abele
Los Angeles Times
A movie thousands of years in the making, “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” takes cameras to where our consumptive need has most alarmingly re-engineered the planet. It’s also, in many ways, a document of a spiritual/environmental undoing.
Filming across a dozen countries, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky continue the visual breadth of their previously observed warning shots about the scope of progress (“Manufactured Landscapes,” “Watermark”) with a reflective tour of excavation, industry and decimation that argues we’ve already moved into a new geological epoch owned entirely by us.
Dotted with alarming facts delivered in gravely intoned voice-over by Alicia Vikander, “Anthropocene” finds the terrible awe in town-destroying terraforming projects in Germany worked by earthmovers of “Mad Max”-like magnitude, the sweeping wretchedness of a city-sized African landfill scavenged by thousands of the poor working alongside sickly looking pelicans, and what the acid-caused bleaching of coral reefs looks like via time lapse photography.
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Read MoreBy Peter Carbonera | Newsweek
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is a documentary film by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier that paints a beautiful and terrifying picture of what human beings are doing to the Earth.
Since the early 1980s Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting what he calls "intentional landscapes," the big and lasting marks that human activities like mining and farming are making on the planet. The film is the third collaboration between Burtynsky and documentary filmmakers Baichwal and de Pencier—the first was Manufactured Landscapes (2006) followed by Watermark (2013)—and is a companion to a coffee-table book of large photographs and a touring museum exhibit. The documentary opened in the United States on September 25.
The title comes from a word used by some geologists to describe the period of natural history we are all living in right now. It was popularized by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who has studied climate change. During the 1980s, Burtynsky says, Crutzen realized, "We as a species have for the first time been such a force on the planet that we have moved it from one geological epoch to another. We have now created a footprint that has left its signature in the future strata of the planet so geologists a million years from now if they dig something up they'll say, 'This is from the anthropocene, when humans on the planet were the dominant species.'"
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Read MoreBy Mary Keown
The Sudbury Star
There is a scene in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch during which a man nonchalantly jumps off the ladder of an excavator.
It is the largest excavator in the world and as the camera pans outward, you realize just how enormous this piece of equipment really is. This excavator, which resembles some kind of post-Apocalyptic nightmarish monster claw from the Mad Max films, is used in the coal mines of western Germany. It stands more than 300 feet high and 700 feet long. It weighs 45,500 tonnes and includes a dozen chassis. Reputed to be one of, if not the largest, land vehicles on earth, it is a sad testament to human innovation.
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Read MoreBy Patrick Mullen
Point of View Magazine
Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier document the devastating consequences of human activity in Anthropocene. In a way, they’ve been documenting it for nearly fifteen years. Anthropocene is the third installment in the team’s epic trilogy of spectacular environmental essay films that began with Manufactured Landscapes (2006) andWatermark (2013). The latest film is the culmination of a major body of work and it’s as visually stunning and intellectually invigorating as the previous two films are. Anthropocene, admittedly, is also a film they’ve made before—although they’ve never quite made a film on such an astonishing scale as this one.
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