RIVER – Review by Liz Braun

Mother was right — you really can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

It certainly works for River, a visually spectacular documentary about the earth’s waterways that delivers a powerful environmental message by leading with positive images.

Mostly carrot and very little stick, River introduces the absolute magnificence of the rivers of this world, seducing a viewer with remarkable footage and inspiring an appreciation of the natural world before bringing down the hammer.

The film really delivers the stunning beauty of brooks and streams and rivers coursing through various landscapes, much of it shot from height — all vibrant, verdant and sometimes vertiginous. Kind of a God’s eye view.

It’s a love letter to water.

As she did with Mountain, her 2017 documentary, Jennifer Peedom (who co-directed River with Joseph Nizeti) calls upon Willem Dafoe for narration on the film. The Australian Chamber Orchestra once again provides the hypnotic soundtrack in this second of Peedom’s planned trilogy of documentaries about our planet.

The movie opens with close-ups of rushing, tumbling, cascading water — a torrent of life-giving H20 that’s gorgeous to witness.

River ties all life to water with a quick history of how rivers formed eons ago and how they then formed us — guiding nomadic humans to settle in fertile river valleys, eventually spawning cities and becoming highways of trade and technology.

But rivers giveth and rivers taketh away, and humans quickly wanted control over the water to prevent both flooding and drought. Having drawn you in with the amazing power and splendour of water on its way to the ocean, River now begins to show how things look after people wrested control of the resource.

Footage of lives fully connected to the water — people swimming, working in rice paddies, engaging in funeral rites on the Ganges — gives way to landscapes that show the result of forcing water where it does not naturally go.

Here are golf courses and fountains in the desert, vast mechanical irrigation systems and aerial shots of huge, cold, looming dams; all fostering delusions of infinite abundance, as the film states.

Some of the most arresting footage is time lapse satellite photography showing rivers shrinking via human encroachment. The last third of the film moves to the negative side, showing the damage done to rivers by pollution and bad stewardship. Chemical sprays, plastic waste and general industrial poison are among the things destroying rivers; Dafoe says, “We will be remembered for all we have depleted, vanished and killed,” and that seems inarguable.

Mother Nature gets the last word here with more phenomenal footage of cloud formations, electrical storms and torrents of rain, but it’s hard to shake off “depleted, vanished and killed.” Point taken.

British author Robert Macfarlane (along with Peedom and Nizeti) wrote the script for River, and it’s a bit twee at times, but you can tune that out.

There are 14 photographers listed in the key cinematography credit for this stunning documentary (and that includes cloud time-lapse, satellite and underwater cinematography), so visual splendour is what’s on offer. For River, the eyes have it.