A documentary by Werner Herzog. Rating unavailable

By no means a comprehensive overview of the biggest technological movement of the 21st century, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is just the kind of offbeat treatise you’d expect from Werner Herzog, asked to ponder the main elements of how we communicate today.

There’s little cinematic about his approach here, which involves chatting with a dozen or so scientists and industry leaders around the world—mostly male, many in California—about the roots and the future of the wired world. Things begin with recollections of the Internet’s 1969 birth, when the first computer-to-computer message, from UCLA to Stanford, failed to complete the word LOGIN, maxing out at the biblical LO instead. Amusingly, original users of the WWW were catalogued in a thin phone book. And if everyone on the web today were listed in print, Herzog says, “The book would be seven miles thick.”

This proliferation isn’t all roses, of course, and the famed director delves into darker aspects, including hacking, AI, game addiction, and robotic issues unknown to our forebears. He makes an odd digression into cyberbullying, with one suburban family—dressed in black, with numerous pastries in the foreground—recalling the horror of one member fatally crashing Dad’s Porsche, and the rest later receiving grisly photos and worse in their emails. No context is given for this weird story, and it’s unrelated in style to the rest of the 98-minute film, in which Herzog’s off-screen (and idiomatically Teutonic) voice interrogates amiable people in their own comfortable settings.

Standouts include an unusually thoughtful Elon Musk, contemplating life in space, and brightly tattooed astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz, who wonders why we prefer claiming other planets to making our current home more habitable. Her specialty is solar flares, and she posits the notion that our entire infrastructure could be fried in one oversized “event”. Another scientist asks how many survivors “would even remember how we lived before everything got wired”. Google that!