Steven Soderbergh and Miramax's presentation of "Naqoyqatsi" is the final installment in a trilogy of Phillip Glass film compositions after "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi." All three films, the products of director Godfrey Reggio, present a condensed message of the destruction of the technological on the world. "Naqoyqatsi," meaning civilized violence, or "life as war" in the Hopi language, describes in music and images the makeup of the modern world as it lurks toward self-destruction. Reggio envisions the film as a unique collage, combining news footage, commercials, and archive film into a surprisingly fluid and familiar canvas.

The film opens with the image of the Tower of Babel. From then on, Reggio explores man's position as "the paragon of species" and his relation to nature and technology. Indeed, "Naqoyqatsi" is a constant dialogue between what is reality and what is fantasy. The manufactured intelligence of the digital age evolves at an exponential rate, and its creator reacts in a correspondingly chaotic way. In this kind of conflict emerges a frantic struggle with the innately mindless, but in an organized, analytical way.

The film is divided into several self-contained visual segments, which explore the areas of natural connection, fear, competition, communication, development and the role of violence in the scheme of nature. The film lends itself to a brilliant post-modern dissertation on the state of all things natural, both human and non-human and the elements of technology, which control them.

Reggio uses these broad areas of iconography to involve such issues as cloning, the stock market, the digital revolution, farming and, what else, the negative impact of America and its global domination. In the long run, the film becomes a kind of visual assortment of the negative aspects of American iconography, rather than the rampant threat of technology.

All of this seems rather cerebral, but in the long run, the film exposes itself more lowbrow than one would expect. The delivery of "Naqoyqatsi," as opposed to the previous two films in the trilogy, is rather pop-oriented, and in this way it is direct and effective.

The film becomes a sort of virtual wax museum of the present visual entrapments that connect the living and the technological. In this regard, "Naqoyqatsi" makes an indelible comment on celebrity itself and the cycle of abstract and specific in the visual lexicon of media. It does so, however, at the expense of brevity, making its pro-environment points heavy-handed.

Ranting aside, one must remember that "Naqoyqatsi" is a marriage of image and music. Without dialogue or conventional narrative, it is naturally challenging to the viewer; in other words, it is not everyone's cup of tea. It is tedious and demanding, but not totally ostracizing.

Those who are genuinely interested and willing to engage with the film's dialogue will find themselves exhausted but rewarded. Although the merging of film and music is not altogether victorious, and is at some points inapt, it makes for a unique laser-light show of post-modern proportions. Reggio's film invites the viewer to view the intricate trappings of reality in a new light.

Glass' score is remarkably accessible, even bordering on the arena of pop at times. Foregoing previous methods of extensive repetition and alienating electronic compositions, the score of "Naqoyqatsi" adds yet another element to the visual in its organic, analog nature. Moments of Glass' work are nothing less than sublime, while others are more incidental. Using offbeat vocal ranges and instruments, including a didgeridoo as well as cello soloist Yo-Yo Ma, the score becomes eclectic without becoming convoluted or alien. Which brings "Naqoyqatsi" back to it's original purpose: the amplification of the musical with the visual.