It's being promoted as a documentary, but Sylvie Rokab's Love Thy Nature is more of a tract, and at times, an extended infomercial for an organization that encourages technology companies to mimic nature in their designs. Mixing crisp HD cinematography with some truly awful animation and many talking heads, Love Thy Nature is also finger-wagging about how you — yes, you — should be outside enjoying the Earth more than you are. The woo about Gaia and such makes even the occasional hard science sound suspect, and questionable statements like people going to parks after 9/11 as proof of the healing power of nature don't help. There's ultimately nothing in the hella-wordy Love Thy Nature about nature versus civilization that wasn't said better in the word-free Koyannisqatsi, and Nature's video games scenes hint at Philip Glass' iconic score for that film. Evidently, today's kids will grow up out of shape and with violent tendencies because of those damn PlayStations, much as past moral panics inveighed against television and comic books. And if the ultimate message of Love Thy Nature is to go outside and play, hopefully a special dispensation will be given to those of us who have to stay inside watching and writing about movies that exhort them to go outside and play.
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