Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.
Into Eternity is a genuinely singular documentary — Michael Madsen approaches an engineering and environmental subject with an almost mythic, meditative tone, addressing hypothetical future humans directly. The cinematography of the vast, cathedral-like underground tunnels of Onkalo is hauntingly beautiful and unlike almost any other documentary aesthetic. The conceptual framing — a message to the deep future about something that will outlast civilization itself — gives the film an extraordinary philosophical weight that earns high marks for both plot (in the sense of intellectual architecture) and novelty. Acting is rated as a documentary where on-screen participants are non-actors/experts, generally adequate but unremarkable. The ending is quietly effective but slightly unresolved, which is thematically appropriate yet leaves the viewer without a strong emotional payoff.