Into Eternity (2010)
Average Rating: 7.8/10
Reviews Counted: 27
Fresh: 27 | Rotten: 0
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 8.2/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 0
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 1,564
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Movie Info
Onkalo (Finnish for "hiding place") is under construction: it's a cavernous world of tunnels and corridors, a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste, meant to last 100,000 years (that's 20 times as long as the pyramids have so far). Conceptual artist Michael Madsen's film is a creepy, eerily elegant meditation on human folly, punctuated by philosophical and historical references, that asks: how do you keep 3,000 future generations from inadvertently opening this Pandora's Box? Should
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All Critics (27) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (28) | Rotten (0) | DVD (1)
Into Eternity is a documentary that may look like a science fiction movie, but it ends up more of a horror film.
Top CriticIn a deceptively low-key manner, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen has beautifully crafted one of the most provocative movies of the year.
Directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen with grace and deep curiosity, "Into Eternity" is better than timely.
Into Eternity provides few solutions regarding the estimated 200,000 to 300,000 tons of N-waste lying around the world, but it does alert us to potentially devastating consequences. Will we heed the warning?
More like a troubling dream, or outtakes from an abandoned David Lynch project, than a conventional documentary.
While nothing said in his film undercuts this worry, the way the movie and the people in it express their concern gives it a feeling of sublimity unusual in most environmentalist documentaries.
Madsen's ominous work is reminiscent, stylistically, of Kubrick's masterworks 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980) in its visual precision and chilly environs.
Into Eternity may be the most honest, as well as the most beautiful, documentary you've ever seen.
Madsen, whose symmetrical compositions and slo-mo shots of uniformed workers have a quality of Kubrickian sci-fi, frames the film as a message to the future.
Finland leads in storing nuclear waste, and what a long strange trip it will be
Watching the film is akin to having a totally immersive, video game-like experience, a journey best described as Lord of the Rings meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This film is about your legacy. If you want to see the future, you want to see this film.
Approaches the Onkalo problem with one part curiosity to two parts dubiousness, reflected in a hyper-aestheticized style that feels equally influenced by Errol Morris, Sigur Rós, and creepy science-fiction movies.
Part instructional video, part existential head-trip
Transcending agitprop, this disturbing documentary gets to the heart of the question of civilization and its discontents.
The story of a nuclear-waste repository designed to last 100,000 years becomes a haunting rumination on time, language, civilization and folly.
The film reaches way beyond the usual activist crowd by making itself as formally compelling as it is tightly argued.
A captivating, and sometimes alarming, exposé of the business end of nuclear power.
As a film, it's extremely mannered. And truly sobering.
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Aside from speculation about the future which is always good nerdy fun, what "Into Eternity" does well is deliver a very subtle anti-nuclear power message, just beneath all of the debate. Onkalo is just one facility that will take 100 years to be built, just to store Finland's nuclear waste for a century. And then you have the amount of nuclear waste in the world today which is about 250,000 tons that has to be disposed of safely, so there will have to be many other sites like Onkalo which could conceivably be time bombs for people thousands of years in the future.
And if anybody is reading this in the year 100,000, I am so unbelievably sorry about "Jersey Shore." I have no idea what we were all thinking.