''The End of Time'' is a 2012 Swiss-Canadian

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

written and directed by Peter Mettler on the loose subject of

time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

Synopsis

Mettler interviews a range of people, including particle physicists at the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

, DJ Richie Hawtin, an environmentalist, activists who seek to renovate

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...

, a hermit who lives on an island threatened by a volcano, and Indian Buddhists, who perform a funeral ritual. Each give their interpretation of what time is and what it means to them. The final interview subject, Mettler's mother, says that we must use what time we are given well.

Cast

* Peter Mettler * Richie Hawtin

Reception

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, a

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, reports an approval rating of 78%, based on nine critical reviews with an average rating of 7.58/10.

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

rated it 56/100 based on six reviews. Jay Weissberg of '' Variety'' wrote, "Intermittently interesting but more often pretentious, this sluggish exploration of time as real and conceived concepts rarely does more than regurgitate philosophical platitudes without locating the depth to make them interesting." Stephen Dalton of ''

The Hollywood Reporter ''The Hollywood Reporter'' (''THR'') is an American digital and print magazine which focuses on the Cinema of the United States, Hollywood film industry, film, television, and entertainment industries. It was founded in 1930 as a daily trade pap ...

'' wrote, "Any sense of narrative momentum or intellectual focus quickly unravels as the film evolves into an almost wordless symphony of disconnected images, sounds and music. But the nature-heavy montages are mostly beautiful and bizarre enough to excuse the film’s pretentious excesses." Peter Howell of ''

The Toronto Star The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part ...

'' rated it 3.5/4 stars and wrote, "Mettler makes a profound statement on what makes all of us tick." Liam Lacey of ''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it ...

'' rated it 2.5/4 stars and wrote that the film "offers lots of opportunities to gaze and muse" but does not offer insights in the subject. Miriam Bale of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' called the film "a form of enforced meditation." Eric Hynes of ''

Time Out New York ''Time Out'' is a global magazine published by Time Out Group. ''Time Out'' started as a London-only publication in 1968 and has expanded its editorial recommendations to 328 cities in 58 countries worldwide. In 2012, the London edition becam ...

'' wrote, "Peter Mettler's ruminative, frequently astounding essay film doesn’t just contemplate this notion; it aims to cinematically embody it." Calum Marsh of ''

The Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the crea ...

'' praised the cinematography but said that the film's pontificating is unnecessary. The film was included in the

Toronto International Film Festival The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, often stylized as tiff) is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a permane ...

's list of "Canada's Top Ten" feature films of 2012. It has been nominated for a 2013

Swiss Film Award The ''Swiss Film Award'' (formerly ''Swiss Film Prize'', also called ''Quartz'') (french: Prix du cinéma suisse, german: Schweizer Filmpreis, it, Premio del cinema svizzero, rm, Premi dal film svizzer) is the national film award of Switzerland, ...

for best documentary film, best film score, and best cinematography.

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:End Of Time, The 2012 films 2012 documentary films Canadian documentary films Swiss documentary films 2010s English-language films Films about time National Film Board of Canada documentaries Films directed by Peter Mettler 2010s Canadian films