“Lo and Behold – Reveries of the connected world” is Werner Herzog’s latest documentary film, and it takes and extraordinary look at the internet. There’s plenty of screen time given to both how it affects humans, and the science behind it all. There’s hackers and robots, as well as stories about internet addiction and abuse. We can see some comedy, tragedy, horror and it’s all real, it’s really fascinating to see the true face of the digital world!
It’s interesting how Werner Herzog doesn’t even own a phone, but his examination of the internet can be smart, unique, entertaining, weird and funny at the same time.
Werner Herzog approaches the internet as if he is a stranger to it, leading to some very naive questions to the highly educated people he is interviewing. They are made to answer different questions than they are used to, and this leads to different answers. For example, we can see Elan Musk being pulled out of his element by Herzog volunteering to go to mars.
I don’t think that it is really justified to criticize this documentary, as you really cannot approach this gigantic subject in such a short amount of time. There could be ten individual movies on just the ten topics in the documentary! Sometimes when a film covers a lot of material it becomes overwhelming, but Herzog manages to balance everything just perfectly, so the whole film works very well and never feels like too much.
It’s not just an average boring science documentary, it’s an entertaining movie because some of the most fascinating people you’ll ever see are interviewed, and they tell some fascinating stories you’ll ever hear, and the good part is that it’s all filled with humor and sometimes absurdity.
There’s plenty of questions raised that are amazing and there’s plenty raised that are scary, but like any documentary, it doesn’t really answer any questions because the internet is a very large subject with an infinite amount of problems.
SERGIU BRIE
SERGIU BRIE
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