Kritiken

Herzog seems concerned about the previous and even current "digital dark age", where the speed of technological advancement will mean that content, materials and records will be lost, but he is too flippant and too eager to infuse the thing with quotable lines to engage with the complexity of what the internet really is and what the speed of technological advancement means to contemporary social and moral codes of humanity.

By the second viewing, it feels like this film has sacrificed depth for breath, and arcs for parts. What initially seems like an over owing cup to be returned to and drunk from repeatedly, feels more like widely spaced-out thimbles of water – refreshing initially but not substantial enough to quench thirst for a satisfying narrative about the connected world.

The internet is an environment where your virtual actions can seem to be consequence-free, so to some extent it encourages people to unleash their worst possible traits. There's some good discussion in the film about what kind of oversight we would ideally want on the internet — not too much, not too little. But short of pursuing a North Korean policy, control of any kind seems hard to achieve.

Herzog's film is never less than watchable by virtue of the line-up of personalities who've agreed to sit for him, though the fact that this one-time outsider artist is now a niche celebrity able to broker such a high level of access is one reason why the final result is so far from attaining the sense of awe and mystery –and back-door lock-jimmying risk-taking – of his best documentary work, from which we are now decades removed.

It has seemed arbitrary that Herzog's humanistic concern for image circulation should emanate from film technology, but Lo and Behold finally makes the relation necessary. Immersing himself in the connected world of information technology, Herzog has made a film that shows why an ecology of vision, and hence filmmaking itself, only makes sense if you know what is human about the world.

Herzog has no cave to explore this time, no smoldering volcano to approach, which leaves the film without a goal. All the more reason why it's a pleasure to hear Herzog's narration as he observes, admires, disparages, and occasionally tells an obvious fib. His commentary is the center, however provisional, of a world that has become a directionless network. His voice is the sound, still present, of human contact.

The film is more quaint and pedestrian [in comparison to Herzog's best work], ironic considering its vast subject matter—the Internet... If Lo and Behold lacks the otherworldly strangeness of Herzog's best documentaries (see Cave of Forgotten Dreams and The White Diamond), it remains slyly unsettling for other reasons.

I would describe Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World as useful for its broaching of Herzog's grumpy demurrals about the Internet and its history and almost completely uninteresting in all other respects.

Mere seconds into his new meditation on information technology, the transporting yet still minor Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, the great Werner Herzog makes one of his patented narratorial overstatements, intoning that the UCLA corridors where the internet was founded decades ago look "repulsive." By the end of the film, the internet history lesson having long since given way to a polyphony of future predictions.

It touches on so many topics and ideas—from early internet history, to online harassment, to crowdsourcing intelligence, to robotics, to AI, to hacking, to a sanctuary free of network signals, to just about everything in between—that it actually amounts to a rather superficial film.

The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail -- the sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning" but with a wickedly funny narrator -- and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked. The film is saved from mere competence by that Herzogian feeling, at once grandiose and self-deprecating.

The film's early, haphazard sections on the architecture of the Internet feel like Herzog faking his way through a book report, as if to give the audience the bare minimum sense of having learned something while comprehending nothing. Yet the film hits its stride as a larger argument emerges: the Internet is sacred; networked culture is proliferating inexorably throughout society; this culture is under manifold ceaseless threats; and we must respect and honor our sacrosanct duty to protect it.