Delayed Reaction: Helvetica

Premise: A documentary about the overwhelming success of the Helvetica font.

The bar is set pretty low for this movie. It's about a font. There is no reason to expect this to be very good. I mean, it's. About. A. Font. The font that's literally used to look the least remarkable. The realistic expectation should be that if this doesn't put people to sleep, then it's a tremendous success.

Naturally, the most impressive thing about Helvetica is that it held my attention the entire time. It's a dry documentary. That's to be expected. It's a lot of experts attempting to dumb things down as much as they can, talking about font. What makes that especially tough is that a font is a supporting player. A font is supposed to call attention to what's being said, not to the font it's typed in. Think of it like this. If someone asked you what your favorite thing about a book you read is and the first thing you say is "I really liked the font", that speaks poorly of the book (for not being interesting) and the font (for distracting from the text).

I sure did come away from this with a greater appreciation of Helvetica though. I never thought about how omni-present it is. It's kind of like when some first tells to that YKK makes all the zippers on your clothes. I can't unsee it now.

The coolest moment is when they show the change in magazine advertisements before and after Helvetica. It's pretty amazing how quickly it exploded. It's also fascinating to see the small structural changes that are crucial in creating a font. They're all still the same letters after all. How different can the fonts really be? Answer: Very.

The documentary does sort of flail at the end. They try to get into the rebellion against Helvetica that followed, but it feels pretty rushed. Like they couldn't figure out if they needed to do another hour on the topic or cut it out completely.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend