The entire scope of the digital age – from the birth of the internet, to artificial intelligence, to catastrophist predictions of the end of days – is crammed into 96 idiosyncratic minutes in this latest documentary by Werner Herzog. And while Herzog’s defiantly esoteric line of commentary works with some subjects – suicidal penguins, for example, in Encounters at the End of the World – he does seem out of his depth at times while navigating this vast and complex subject. Herzog’s USP here is that, as a luddite who doesn’t even carry a mobile phone, he is essentially a technological tourist, an outsider looking into the digital world. It’s a sporadically fascinating film that dips its toe into many different themes where perhaps it should have chosen to immerse itself in just one or two.
