I'm a great fan of Greenaway's best films but the Moab Story, the first part of a series, I found unwatchable. As a showcase for innovative techniques of multi-split-screen, voices echoed to infinity, incongruously stage-like sets and a host of other techniques, many of them ground breaking, it is excellent but the techniques seem to have little or no relevance to the story (whatever that might be) more like a creative genius had lost his marbles one night in an attic with the latest software. The hodgepodge plot, vaguely glimpsed and more discernable from publicity material than the film itself, concerns a historian traveler in Utah and the search for Uranium. As a character, Luper carries little conviction and the subsidiary characters carry even less. The over-riding feeling is one of two hours of pretentiously unsuccessful abstract art.
