A line from Grizzly Man stands as the defining text for Werner Herzog's recent, triumphant career in documentary film-making. "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder," he says in that disconcertingly warm burr.
Within the first few moments of this meditation on the internet, Werner offers suggestions that we’ll be travelling down a similar road. “The corridors look repulsive, but this one leads to a shrine,” he says. Do they? The passageways of UCLA’s Boelter Hall are no more “repulsive” than those in any other academic satellite. There’s a sense that Herzog is working hard to set us up for another evening of apocalyptic despair.
That's not how Lo and Behold works out. Divided into 10 distinct chapters – some dealing with a particular period, others with a key theme – the picture approaches the subject in a spirit of inquisitive good-humour. Herzog's comments from behind the camera suggest an enthusiastic student eager to demonstrate his attentiveness.
Elon Musk, the PayPal multi-billionaire, explains how hard it might prove to persuade citizens to join his proposed wagon train to Mars. “I would come along,” Werner pants. “I wouldn’t have a problem.” Musk seems taken aback by the childlike fervour.
The trademark pessimism is still there. In one dizzyingly gloomy episode, experts speculate on how a massive solar flare might wipe out the internet entirely. The boffins walk us through the worst possible scenario: starvation, disorder, total breakdown of social structures. Visions of Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron powering through the outback prove hard to dispel. Elsewhere, we meet first-world people who, apparently made sick by wireless signals, have retired to a rural retreat for relief.
The most powerful section of the film focuses on the awful trials of the Castouras family. Interviewed in his home, with wife and remaining children around him, Mr Castouras explains how his daughter died after driving the family Porsche into a tollbooth. The family were still processing the news when an anonymous email arrived containing photographs of the dead woman’s body.
A baffling (but, sadly, inevitable) deluge of foul trolling followed. Mrs Castouras’s chilling assertion that the internet is a “manifestation of the antichrist” looks to be gesturing towards further horrors, but Herzog pulls back to consider the medium’s more savoury possibilities.
Lo and Behold plays like a journey with no certain destination. It begins in Boelter Hall with a primitive dial-up connection. In 1969, scientists at that place attempted to pass the word "login" from one computer to another. They only got as far as the first two letters and, thus, established "lo" as the first message to be communicated on the internet (obviously, nothing that fits the definition then existed, but history still records this as the equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mary had a little lamb" moment.)
At the other end of the film – the bit that juts into the future – we discuss life on Mars, self-driving cars and robots that can play football. Sebastian Thrun, an expert in robotics, claims that we will eventually have an artificial intelligence that is able to make movies. “Will they be as good as yours? No one can come close,” he adds. That shows due respect.
Lo and Behold is, however, not the best work by this particular human. The film is backed with interesting turns and provocative questions, but it lacks any cohesive shape and it fails to find a satisfying direction. It plays like a series of diverting essays on a subject about which almost everybody is now some sort of expert. There's simply not enough Herzog here.
