Review: Time and space are just steps away in dazzling Magic Atlas
Every movie is a cultural artifact, a piece of art we can look back on in the years and decades and centuries to come to know something about the world in which it was made. Maybe we can read into the political and social movements that at work at the time, or understand what the major thematic preoccupations of the moment were. At the very least, any movie is a time capsule of a sort, a thing we can look at and know dozens or hundreds or thousands of people spent time working toward creating something and then put it out in the world to be seen, discussed, criticized, mulled over, maybe hater or forgotten. The product of over ten years of work by filmmaker Sun Xun, Magic Atlas lets us in on a bit of the behind-the-scenes flag-planting of its own coordinates in the grand history of art and cinema. As the film comes to an end, text appears on screen talking about the process of the making the film and thanking some of the people who helped it come to fruition. Most interestingly, it tal...
