Peter Mettler's cinematic meditation on the nature of time, The End of Time, begins with a look at the extremely small (the CERN Large Hadron Collider smashing protons at high speeds) and ends with a look at the extremely large (the telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert penetrating the universe and the deepest parts of time). In between, we see many things, some of which are amazing, while others are a little too familiar.
On the amazing side of things is the sequence centered on an active volcano in Hawaii. We see its hellish smoke, its otherworldly slopes, its red lava rising from cracks in the earth and black lava hardening on prone roads. A human lives out here and watches the volcano from a distance that does not seem at all safe. His porch has a view of the history and the future of the world: its birth, its death, its rebirth. In one scene, huge trees are burned like matchsticks; in another scene, new and strange green plants are making an impressive comeback. The lone human doesn't have anything profound to say about all of this; he just watches the volcano and waits, it seems, for his own death...
