Spectacular vistas shot in 70 millimeter are a fine way to spend time in a movie theater. And “Samsara,” the new dialogue-free documentary from Ron Fricke (“Baraka”), offers plenty.
Angkor Wat is shown in long, loving detail; shorter, equally stunning scenes appear of Petra, the Himalayas and the Blue Mosque. People begin to appear in scenes such as a prominent sequence involving Buddhist monks executing a sand painting at their monastery in India.
The movie isn’t presented as a narrative, but still, a story emerges when a machine begins to sweep away helpless, chirping chickens. Then come the stomach-churning scenes of pigs and cows and factory farms until — wham! Here are the fat people, chomping burgers.
Is the audience being told, perhaps, that it has become unmoored from life’s spiritual component? Yes, indeed. But truly, it doesn’t seem reasonable to visually rebuke a fast-food patron for not being more like a Buddhist monk. We all have our ways of getting through life. Some have sand painting; some have french fries.
Eventually “Samsara” cycles back to the splendor with which it began; a scene showing the Haj in Mecca is as breathtaking as anything seen on-screen all year. The drawbacks to this often rhapsodically beautiful film lie not in the journey itself, but in the preachy detours taken along the way.