This is difficult to say, but Architecton is offensively long and boring. What kind of documentary hides its topic from its audience for most of its (98) minutes?
Well, I won’t hide things from you: For most of the movie you’ll watch rocks. No narration or screen-text will help you understand what you’re looking at, but hey, at least orchestral music will blast your eardrums.
Every so often you’ll hope to be saved by certain in-between scenes, during which an architect supervises the construction of a circle of—you guessed it, rocks—on his lawn. I wish I could tell you why he’s doing that.
Only in the last ten minutes or so do the moviemakers disclose the idea: Modern architecture, what with all its concrete, is short-term and harmful to humans and the planet, and ancient building techniques are not. Got it.
Nothing makes up for the fact that the movie hides this from us. Sure, a few of the scenes are truly gorgeous—I mean, have you ever seen rocks boil like water or coordinate like ants?—but they are not nearly frequent or brief or enlightening enough for this movie to treat us this way.
Maybe, just maybe, the moviemakers want us to feel the enormity of the scale at which we blast mountains to crumble their parts to pour concrete to raise buildings to later knock down buildings? But even if that’s right, we could’ve learned it in a more engaging and efficient way.