Gravity What bothered me the most was that it seemed like werner herzog used his reputation to get famous people in front of the camera, and just decided to have a chit chat on the record... the whole piece lacked any clear direction, concept or depth as it were shot for a tv news channel. it was painful to watch him do interviews with seemingly random people and could not even convince them to talk... then there's this cutscene of elon musk, looking down to his knees, not knowing what else to say in an absolute absence of guidance and substance.maybe he thought getting smart and famous people in front of the camera would do the trick, but nothing fills that void when you don't have a story to tell in the first place...

artmania90 WERNER HERZOG is a world class director who seems to keep his projects revolving around the constant thought of dreams. What could have been, what will happen, what are we thinking, and ultimately who are we? To make a documentary about the Internet, which would seem so rooted in science, and then use it to explore humanity and all our flaws and desires, made for a movie that is both eye-opening and reflective. For Herzog, I would expect nothing less, but the documentary still surprised me in more ways that one.It's a slow-churning story told in 10 chapters. The familiar voice of Werner himself narrates the action, through interviews and questions that attempt no less than to determine the progress of humanity with the dawn of the technological age; the age in which we are all connected and information is both limitless and ever-growing.In a small room in a science classroom in California, the very Internet was born in the 1960's, and the first transmitted message "LOG" was cut off midway through. As one man explains, the importance and simplicity of that first message ("lo and behold what man has achieved") is the thesis on which Herzog explores the topics. We see how information grew, how newspapers were first programmed for people to view on their home computers, how emails began to document business needs at almost instantaneous speeds. What a marvel, indeed.Smartly, Herzog also explores the darker shades of our brilliance: of hate mail and the lawlessness of the online community. From hackers to a family who received spam emails of their daughter's mangled body, nearly decapitated in a car wreck... The tapestries of any invention are countless, but as the documentary begins to explore, no man made invention in history has ever grown at such an exponential rate. A wide-eyed woman with a Stepford Wife's sensibility declares "the Internet is Satan."In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Lo And Behold would be a bore of talking heads and the breakdown of important dates and times. Herzog seems to relish the bore, asking his subjects questions that often throw them off ("do you love this robot?"). It's oftentimes quite funny, but when we explore the darker implications just below the surface, it could also be one of the scariest films I have ever viewed. With our reliance on the internet so thoroughly engrossed in our lives, one scientist speculates that potentially billions could die were a large solar flare to wipe out electricity as we know it. Nature give and nature take away, but has humanity moved beyond the point of simple survival without technological help?With a haunting score that recalls precious Herzog themes, the movie is nonetheless a fascinating and endlessly entertaining journey through modern times, with Herzog's deliciously German accent piercing through the bland images of computers and wires. There seems no better director to tackle this subject matter, and in fact I doubt many other filmmakers could achieve something so remarkable from something so apparently average as the Internet.I left this movie, looked around, thought about life. There's an existential theme at work which forced me to think about how my life is wholly dependent on machines. They make life easier. I need them for daily support and connectivity. At this point in society, 2016, what is life if not the reliance on technology?

Jimmy Baginski The was a small disappointment for me. Wheeling in a long succession of intellectuals and posing philosophically abstract questions at them about the implications of the Internet seems like something that could yield interesting results. In this case it leads almost nowhere. Boffins and great minds are sometimes a slave to their own sense of purpose and grandeur, always looking to imagine the most incredible eventualities and possibilities regardless of how impossible or possible they are. The people in this documentary are no doubt amazing intellects who have the native IQ to leave myself and the majority of humans dead in the water. However, it takes an intellectual to sell the idea that the Internet could gain autonomy and want to control us as a species. This is anthropomorphic projection on the grandest Earthly scale.Werner also employs a deeply foreboding soundtrack of elongated drones and celestial dread to add weight to the scientific poetry and future doomsday predictions of his interviewees. At times you could almost be drawn into this darkening of mood, but then you hear another piece of vague mumbo-jumbo and interlocutory nonsense and chuckle, remembering: it's a documentary by Werner Herzog, which sadly means you are just experiencing his default style. As well, the question "can the Internet dream of itself?" is so deeply boring and unbound by any objective framework it merely acts as a conceit from which to further ramble on the topic of non- biological sentience (something this film does rather well) and ends up in another cul-de-sac, (like all conceits do). The area of AI is seemingly in a very strange cultural place right now whereby hitherto rational people are being drawn into imagining a secular religion based around a technological cosmology. Technology is either the devil, God, or both. Either way, the great power it possesses comes from the mundane necessities of our collective lives. Mythologising is fun but really we just want the same things we've always wanted (see Maslow 'hierarchy of needs'). The internet will not change that. This strange, almost creepy substitution for God in Godless world, or power bigger than ourselves, is silly to watch coming out of intelligent people's mouths. Humans will not sleepwalk into the matrix. We will not eat the apple in the garden of Eden and reach a tipping point between our desire for technological innovation and the rise of AI overlords. This won't happen because humans won't desire it. Even if it was plausible, the road to such an event is not clearly laid out here. Lastly, moral questions about the effects of technology are useful. This poses some but doesn't go deep enough into them in order to create a basis or first principle to work from. Too much technology is one thing but please explain why. What should we keep and why? What should we discard and why?Anyway, partially thought-provoking but ultimately limited to thought experiments and conjecture about a future we can only vaguely imagine and will likely not happen.

bob the moo The internet is only a small subject for those that (like me) see it in the simple terms of what I know I do on it – check emails, read information, etc. However with such an expansive subject it was a good thing that the curious mind of Herzog was given the project of examining it in this film. I have read some people complain about the weakness of this film as a 'documentary', with comments about how key players such as Mark Zuckerberg and others are not included; the answer to such criticism is in the title, because this is not a documentary so much as it is a reverie, which is to say a musing and free-floating daydream through the subject.In the editing suite this was obviously reined in somewhat because the film is structured into broad chapters. This helps the film be watchable, but importantly does not lose the sense of drifting through the subject with plenty to think about but nothing too solid that would break the state of reverie. Whether or not this works for you will depend on the individual, but Herzog's style made it work for me because he drives this approach with his angles and his line of thought (although he often seems less present than in some other of his films). It doesn't all fit together neatly of course, and at times tonally it is uneven, but mostly it is a quite fascinating wander through the ideas and connections of the internet, and is well worth seeing for what it leaves you with as much as what it offers directly.