Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

The documentary starts in a university corridor in California. Werner Herzog walks into a room in Boelter Hall at UCLA and points at a grey cabinet: the first message on the internet was sent from here to Stanford on the night of 29 October 1969. The word being typed was LOGIN; the system crashed after two letters and only LO arrived at the other end. That is where the title comes from. The film is divided into ten chapters, each looking at a different question: the early days, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, cyber attack, internet addiction, the possibility of a solar storm, and the future. Herzog listens to the experts but does not question them like an engineer; he asks whether the internet could dream of itself, and they try to answer. Werner Herzog wrote, directed and narrated. Among the interviewees is Leonard Kleinrock, who was present when that first message was sent. The hardest section is not technical: an interview with a family destroyed by a crash photograph circulated online cuts off all the documentary's optimism. Who it is for: anyone who likes Herzog's documentaries and philosophical questions about technology. Who it is not for: anyone wanting depth. There is not enough running time for ten chapters, some subjects stay on the surface, and Herzog's manner occasionally gets in front of the subject.