Review of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) by Elric N — 15 Feb 2017

Every time Werner Herzog releases a documentary it gets these glowing reviews and I feel like I need to give him another shot and every time I regret it. Herzog is a terrible documentarian. His fictional films, on the other hand, can be brilliant.

But my god, these documentaries are bloated, disorganized, poorly filmed studies of obsessives by an obsessive. This one is particularly bad. You get the impression Herzog one day had the epiphany, "Ah, ze technologies are important.

My next film shall be on ze topic of ze technologies." And he never narrowed it down any further than that. Sorry Werner, but the internet is too big a topic for one documentary. This film jumps from the birth of the internet to MOOCs on Udacity to some kind of self-driving car rally.

Any one of these is topic enough for a documentary. Linking them together as just "stuff the internet can do" doesn't make for a coherent viewing experience. Then we get some dude who seems to have made some game wherein people online fold RNA molecules in different ways.

We are given the broad sense that this has some real world consequences and that it is valuable crowd-sourcing, but how is never made clear. Write another script, Werner.