Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I have seen Werner's name and jumped on it. Wow! Must see it.Minute after minute it becomes more painful. An exercise in ignorance, a glorification of stupidity. Back in the late 1970s there was no Internet, only ArpaNET. Yet the director and his ignorant crowd find the Internet in 1969! And what a wonderful thing! When all your life you have used pen and paper and now, an old man, someone shows you the magic of Skype, sure, it looks magical. But when you look at the protocols of the Internet, how they were built, how they were simply a way some bearded geeks made computers actually talk in English words between them, it becomes scary. No encryption. No privacy. Not because the ones designing the internet ever cared about privacy. That was way beyond their ability. The broken email protocol in which anybody can inject emails and pretend to be someone else. All the identifying bits. The lack of certification, because they all knew each other. A mess. A disgusting mess that even today seems impossible to fix. Yet it remains the only option simply because nobody has the resources to start a second project.And all are competing in who can be more ignorant. Did you know that on the Space Station one module communicates with another module on the Space Station through the Internet? The people inside might suffocate because some security cameras are trying to download the latest Xmen movie. Lawrence Krauss, the specialist into the Origins of the Universe. Actually a clown specializing in talking for big sums of money. Did he program something for the Internet? He is a physicist. Was Internet started in his University lab? Nothing at all. He is there to talk about "will it have its own consciousness?" He has no idea. But he has enough fans that he was inserted to help the box office.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

The was a small disappointment for me. Wheeling in a long succession of intellectuals and posing philosophically abstract questions at them about the implications of the Internet seems like something that could yield interesting results. In this case it leads almost nowhere. Boffins and great minds are sometimes a slave to their own sense of purpose and grandeur, always looking to imagine the most incredible eventualities and possibilities regardless of how impossible or possible they are. The people in this documentary are no doubt amazing intellects who have the native IQ to leave myself and the majority of humans dead in the water. However, it takes an intellectual to sell the idea that the Internet could gain autonomy and want to control us as a species. This is anthropomorphic projection on the grandest Earthly scale.Werner also employs a deeply foreboding soundtrack of elongated drones and celestial dread to add weight to the scientific poetry and future doomsday predictions of his interviewees. At times you could almost be drawn into this darkening of mood, but then you hear another piece of vague mumbo-jumbo and interlocutory nonsense and chuckle, remembering: it's a documentary by Werner Herzog, which sadly means you are just experiencing his default style. As well, the question "can the Internet dream of itself?" is so deeply boring and unbound by any objective framework it merely acts as a conceit from which to further ramble on the topic of non- biological sentience (something this film does rather well) and ends up in another cul-de-sac, (like all conceits do). The area of AI is seemingly in a very strange cultural place right now whereby hitherto rational people are being drawn into imagining a secular religion based around a technological cosmology. Technology is either the devil, God, or both. Either way, the great power it possesses comes from the mundane necessities of our collective lives. Mythologising is fun but really we just want the same things we've always wanted (see Maslow 'hierarchy of needs'). The internet will not change that. This strange, almost creepy substitution for God in Godless world, or power bigger than ourselves, is silly to watch coming out of intelligent people's mouths. Humans will not sleepwalk into the matrix. We will not eat the apple in the garden of Eden and reach a tipping point between our desire for technological innovation and the rise of AI overlords. This won't happen because humans won't desire it. Even if it was plausible, the road to such an event is not clearly laid out here. Lastly, moral questions about the effects of technology are useful. This poses some but doesn't go deep enough into them in order to create a basis or first principle to work from. Too much technology is one thing but please explain why. What should we keep and why? What should we discard and why?Anyway, partially thought-provoking but ultimately limited to thought experiments and conjecture about a future we can only vaguely imagine and will likely not happen.

Werner Herzog's exploration of the Internet and the connected world.My expectation was that this film would explore the development of the Internet and a bit about how it works and has expanded. To an extent, this is accurate. We get a look at the birthplace of the Internet, and we see plenty of stories about the world of computing, especially hacking (both from cyber threats and from trophy-hunters like Kevin Mitnick).But we go way beyond that. I am disappointed that we don't explore the Internet more, but Herzog makes up for this by exploring other loosely connected ideas. Space travel to Mars, for one. He also talks with people who have an intense sensitivity to electro-magnetic fields. The most bizarre segment involves a family who was apparently attacked over the death of their daughter. Herzog makes the family look a bit crazy, and this isn't helped by the mother's claim that the Internet is the Anti-Christ, a view that clearly demonstrates she is mentally unstable.

The internet is only a small subject for those that (like me) see it in the simple terms of what I know I do on it – check emails, read information, etc. However with such an expansive subject it was a good thing that the curious mind of Herzog was given the project of examining it in this film. I have read some people complain about the weakness of this film as a 'documentary', with comments about how key players such as Mark Zuckerberg and others are not included; the answer to such criticism is in the title, because this is not a documentary so much as it is a reverie, which is to say a musing and free-floating daydream through the subject.In the editing suite this was obviously reined in somewhat because the film is structured into broad chapters. This helps the film be watchable, but importantly does not lose the sense of drifting through the subject with plenty to think about but nothing too solid that would break the state of reverie. Whether or not this works for you will depend on the individual, but Herzog's style made it work for me because he drives this approach with his angles and his line of thought (although he often seems less present than in some other of his films). It doesn't all fit together neatly of course, and at times tonally it is uneven, but mostly it is a quite fascinating wander through the ideas and connections of the internet, and is well worth seeing for what it leaves you with as much as what it offers directly.