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Garbage Warrior

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by Ellie Bramley
This is a powerful and emotive film about what starts out as a one-man mission: Michael Reynolds', the Garbage Warrior, builds up a following of misfits and gains notoriety, coming up against hurdle after hurdle in his plight to build sustainable and self-sufficient housing and ultimately help save the planet.

The filming is a little rough around the edges, like the Reynolds' houses, which are all experimental and use beer cans and tyres packed tight with earth as their building blocks.  War-like drum beats signal the call to battle in this film, while beautiful long scanning shots of the wild backdrop of the New Mexico desert take on a leading role side by side with this man’s crazy yet inspired ideas and relentless drive.
 
The Garbage Warrior himself has something of Stig of the Dump about him, crossed with the manic scientist from Independence Day.  But for all his eccentricity he is brushed with a stroke of genius that helps turn his unconventional ideas and attitude into a real force to be reckoned with, and that force is unquestionably good.  This proves true for the stagnant and filibustering state legislature who ban his rule-bending houses and for the stiffs of the American Board of Architects who first ban him from their ranks before inviting him back on hearing of his work in the tsunami-wrecked Andaman Islands. There he manages to get done in two weeks what would take him three years in the tightly regulated US.  Reynolds has, in his own words: “crawled up their assholes to change them from the bloodstream.”
 
The first half of the film sees him in his element with the wide New Mexico skies above his head, jogging with his dogs and in his at once ramshackle yet beautiful houses, with birds and butterflies flapping magically around and with glass bottles that look like semi-precious stones set into the walls.  He is a self-confessed freak magnet and for years he and his crew built a community for themselves, some of them spending years without plumbing or even roofs over their heads.  There are idyllic shots of this community, built literally from scratch and with recycled materials, living the dream:  playing ball in their backyard-desert, strumming guitars, and of their children playing, many of whom have never even been in a conventional house and have no notion of expensive central heating bills and supermarkets.
After years of experimenting freely with these builds, Reynolds comes up against his state legislature who overnight put a halt to his intellectual and practical freedoms which had previously allowed him to dream up an idea one day and build it literally the next. We see him don his ‘uniform’, cowboy boots and all, his straggly hair tied back and we watch on the edge of our seats as he takes on the labyrinthine, game-playing, nit-picking state legislature.
 
This is ultimately a film about one-man’s immense vision.  He idolises Noah for standing in the middle of the desert, miles from any water and building a boat because he saw something coming.  It is a fascinating character portrayal of an off-the-wall man who has far more sense and integrity than those in power.  In the wake of the tsunami and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there can be no ignoring global warming.  This is an incredibly compelling and well-told story about how the very houses we build to protect us from natural disasters can also be made in a way that may curb the environment’s destructive tendencies in the first place.

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