It's interesting how my two least favorite movies from this year's Sundance are the two most similar: this and A Glitch in the Matrix. They are both documentaries about technology encroaching on the human experience. The reason I dislike them are pretty different though. A Glitch in the Matrix made a poor but clear case for its topic. Frankly, I'm not sure what the point of All, Light Everywhere is. It's sort of about surveillance, or maybe the danger of man's desire to observe more and draw conclusions from those observations.
It's hard to even set the movie up. Like a lot of documentaries, it bounces between a couple different narratives. There's an extended tour of the company that makes body cams and tasers for police. There's a police training class learning about their body cams. There's a man trying to sell Baltimore on using his satellite observation technology which can watch over the city in real time. Occasionally, it gives a history lesson on early telescopes, photograph technology, or criminal cataloging. The core ideas that the movie is examining are interesting. There are brief stretches that really captured my attention, like when it explains how body cams are developed not to be perfect but to mimic the human eye (to reflect what the police see in a situation) or the community meeting about the pros and cons of the "god's eye view" camera system over Baltimore. It nicely slow plays where the history lesson about criminal cataloging leads to. I hated nearly everything about the presentation and editing though. It felt scattered, like they weren't done with the final cut. This was amplified by an epilogue with clips of something else that they spent a lot of time filming but decided to cut since it didn't fit with the rest. So, why tell us about it at all? I don't care about this thing that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
I wish I had more nuanced thoughts about why I didn't like this movie. It just didn't work.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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