Doctor Strange Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Cert: 12A. Now showing Cert: Club. Now showing in IFI

Only a filmmaker of Werner Herzog’s inimitable scope and world view could sculpt a documentary treatment of something as ubiquitous as the internet and simultaneously retool our understanding of it.

Such a stranglehold has technology on our existence that for many the trees may well be obscuring the wood of what all this dependence may be doing for us. Herzog plays to type by hearing out experts via several unnerving chapters along his thread of discourse. Artificial intelligence (featuring an incredible football playing robot) gives way to ideas of consciousness and a possible redefining of a humanity sharing earth with machines. Our lives are made easier, but is this a good thing? Has it left us helpless if, as might one day happen, solar flares knock out our electricity supplies? With restraint and sensitivity, Herzog also meets a family whose daughter took her own life following cyberbullying.

With that hissing Teutonic inflection, the 74-year-old ponders aloud our possible downfall while meeting a brilliant and bizarre cast

of experts (Ted Nelson and Elon Musk feature) as he charts the creation, evolution and distortions of the internet and its grip on us. Lo and Behold is not, however, just a big state-of-the-world rant. We’re shown technology’s role in improving science and education, and Herzog, perhaps guilty of some slight selfparody in his old age, leaves his bemusement and idiosyncrasies in the edit. Required viewing.