Documentaries are notoriously difficult to rate because their value as art pieces can run against their value as perspective pieces.
River has beautiful cinematography with many phenomenal sweeping shots of natural formations, lightning and clouds, and waterfalls accompanied by a concert of equally beautiful music. Willem Dafoe's soothing narration completes the experience and overall makes for a masterfully done artistic piece.
Unfortunately for the script itself, despite Willem Dafoe's excellent narration, it contains little to either present a perspective or provide sufficient information to open discussion to any interesting perspectives. It's shallow at best (no pun intended) and misleading at worst. At times I wondered whose shower thoughts I was intruding upon.
While spending the movie discussing how humanity has come to control rivers, it lightly touches upon the issue with how we handle disposable plastics as if it's inherent to how bodies of water are harnessed and not an otherwise mutually exclusive problem landing in nature's particulate highway. It ends an argument against damming with a river boldly reclaiming itself through the dam to bring its sediment back to a healthy place! Oh joy! Oh wait, a simple google search shows this is just annual routine for sediment to be dumped.
The deepest question the movie asks us is if it really is all worth it in the end? The subjugation of rivers, taking human control back from nature's "wisdom" and using rivers to humanity's benefit in an optimized fashion rather than letting causality take the wheel. Now this is just my opinion but: Yes! Humanity's ability to flourish and suffer less from simple tragedies like starvation and lack of energy to transport and operate critical infrastructure in necessity and in excess to allow for creativity such as this specious film are quite worth the cost!
All in all, River is a beautiful audiovisual experience and thought-provoking such that it is best enjoyed in a viewer's non-native language.
