An ever-growing web of information permeating our lives in ways we never imagined seems like a great match for Herzog to play around in; the title comes from the first segment on the creation of the internet, when we learn that the very first message sent from one computer to another was “lo”, which is compared to the phrase “lo and behold.” The creation of the internet as an Event, something with an unexpected grandiose impact, puts it on the level of the big bang, and starting with that sets expectations for a thoughtful film with Herzog’s odd flair. Instead it’s just a quick moment in the first of many dalliances into facets of the internet, AI, and technological progress as a whole.
The film is broken up into ten parts which cover not just the internet, but technological progress, its effect on us, and our connection to it as a whole. The segments are often brief and only provide a shallow view on their subjects. Many of these topics are worth a feature documentary on their own, including cybersecurity, people who claim to be allergic to wireless radiation, and stories from so called greatest hacker Kevin Mitnick, but Herzog skims over all of them. The shortest is on what Herzog refers to as the “dark side of the web,” and despite the internet having endless sources of nastiness and causing all sorts of moral panics, he chooses to focus on just one family affected by a very straightforward invasion of privacy: an EMT posted images of their daughter’s corpse after a gruesome car accident, which were used to make sick memes and treated as a joke. Not to discount this family’s horrific experience, but with cyberbullying, trolls, and revenge porn all becoming hot button topics, it’s strange not to even touch on any of them. Even worse, their story is undercut by how they’re portrayed; the entire family sits in a rigidly arranged living room (even the rolls on the table are perfectly arranged), all wearing black with thousand yard stares, and the mother mentions that she believes the internet is the spirit of the antichrist. They are the entirety of this segment and it almost seems like Herzog is treating the topic as a joke.
Lo and Behold is disjointed, and completely loses focus by part VII, which brings Elon Musk and his mission to Mars into the mix, but I think the fundamental problem is deeper than the form or the depth of content. The problem is that Herzog likes thinking about the internet, but doesn’t seem to know that much about it, or at least is out of touch with it. He starts with the first internet message, but only mentions the creation of the World Wide Web in passing over an hour later, neglecting to explore how the idea of hyperlinks and websites become essential. It’s not exactly common knowledge that the web and internet aren’t actually interchangeable concepts, but if you’re talking about the history of the internet, isn’t it vital to explain how its structure works? Instead he moves on to a variety of topics, from computational theory on bandwidth to self driving cars and AI capable of learning, as if he thinks any sufficiently advanced technology is all ‘the internet’ like how your mom might think every video game console is ‘Nintendo’.
Except in this instance your mom wrote a book about gaming, spent three chapters the people who get motion captured for fighting games, went on a tangent about the rise of table tennis tournaments while discussing Atari, and wondered if the block building in Tetris is a critique of communism.
