Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
Director: Werner Herzog
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 3.0
The German auteur - who's been very busy of late - turns his attention from nature to machinery, going to UCLA to see where the Internet began (first message 'sent': "Lo" ... not a reference to Nabokov, sadly) and then starts covering various aspects of our digital age, from addiction to online gaming, sickness from digital signals (echoing Haynes' Safe), cyber bullying, self-driving cars, Elon Musk taking us to space and shit, solar flares and their effect on the Earth and so forth. One could argue Herzog's spreading himself too thin with this one - each segment could theoretically be a film in itself - but it's still a notable documentary, with Herzog keeping in the back of his mind the human element to all this code and hardware: he asks several participants about dreams ("can the Internet dream of itself?"), affection (to a Carnegie Mellon student regarding a soccer-playing robot: "do you love it?") and the future of life on Earth if communication systems were disrupted (doom!). If there's one person on this planet who should be sent to explore Mars it's Herzog (take him seriously, Elon) ... but the second any of these dweebs tries to replace human sexuality with any kind of cybernetic machinery I'm getting my pitchfork out.
