All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Another set of films that highlight how the crossroads of utopian solutions, oversimplification, misunderstanding, hubris, and ideology contribute to creating an unexamined foundational set of assumptions about civilization and humanity.

One of the most interesting documentaries I've seen in the last few years, examining how elements such as politics, economy, genetics and technology influence each other, and how seemingly small actions can have huge and terrible consequences. It's fascinating, painful, depressing and frightening to see how mankind often has no idea what it's doing. The editing, footage and use of music were amazing. Recommended to everyone.

A bunch of crazy people try to control the world with math. Unintended consequences. Roy Orbison.

It at times is reductionistic in order to preserve the main thesis of a second revolution of mechanical philosophy, while at the same time meandering into for example Ayn Rands personal life in an unnecessary but interesting story of hypocricy. It puts forward extremely thought-provoking ideas and sheds new light unto recent events to the extent of leaving you with the impression that the documentary was made in 2050.

Curtis is an intelligent and clever filmmaker, but he is also deliberately propagandizing various issues into one big bad science myth in order to make his point come across. In this manner he's not that different from the politicians he clearly detests. And he needs a change of soundtrack.

Adam Curtis is the great documentary storyteller, conveyor of ideas by audiovisual means, and moralist of our times. This series ranges widely but always purposefully through material including Ayn Rand, Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, John Von Neumann, William Hamilton and many others, tied together by an investigation of mechanistic conceptions of life and cognitivist conceptions of human thinking and behaviour. Immensely pleasurable viewing.

Very interesting, but it didn't go where I expected it to.

I don't even think this should really be on Criticker, but I watched all 3 hours, so fuck it. All Watched Over is much more intricate than what the synopsis would have you believe. Using a general theme of the ultimate failure of the computer age, Curtis is able to touch upon topics like free will, economics, the role of power and love in human actions, ecology, eugenics, and imperialism. It's a lot to digest, but I think anyone would shocked by what unfolds.

An extremely well-crafted and engaging exposé of the systemic problems with a complex, intertwined list of economical, sociopolitical, ideological and scientific theories of the late 20th century, brilliantly structured around the individuals at the center of it all. Essential viewing - nothing less.

Work of Adam Curtis always stimulates the right spot of my brain. This is fascinating information presented in easy to understand and entertaining way. It doesn't make life any easier, though. Human race is FUBAR.

Thought provoking very visual documentary that runs smoothly over its all up 3 hour running time. Throws a lot of information and ideas around yet never overloads you. Constantly mixes it up whether it be with interviews, archive footage or pop music. Probably the most enthralling learning experience I've seen on film.

fascinating and a joy to watch as always, but a tad more scattershot than Curtis' previous work

It's becoming more painful to observe with each Curtis docu-series that people are just incapable of understanding the complexities of reality yet they try to bend it over and over again to some simplified model. Damn you evolution, why you had to do us dirty like that? Maybe our computer overlords will one day be able to save us from ourselves through some cyborg or we would simply let go of our massive egos and just start living without being scared of each other.

At least the end of days will have a sick soundtrack.

A typically strong outing from Curtis, even if the second part is a bit weaker. The connections here are well formed, if not always entirely convincing, yet consistently well presented. Fuck the PS2.

Yikes.

Informative and kinda chilling doc about how the cold logic of computers is applied to human and animal life by researchers.

(+) Well put together (-) Hard to make out what the message/point is of the maker(s)

a motley collection of arguments, some of whose reductionism and haphazard connectedness should annoy anyone. So what is the point? After Freud, now is Darwin wrong? So after all your previous attacks against 'irrationalism', now the new target is the 'rationalism' of cybernetics & ecology? So you say we have to care about politics (I don't buy the argument -again repeated in this doc- that Clinton was an angel but his policies only blocked by the necessities of technocrats & markets)

Super interesting, although I didn't necessarily understand how it all related together. I thought the first and third parts were the most compelling. Loved the editing.

Shockingly amateur production values/editing, excessively and blatantly ideological without supporting evidence and ramblingly in-cohesive.

Scattershot, most definitely, and the exploration of so many theories from various disciplines makes for a disorienting experience. But the way in which it presents its pessimistic vision of the modern world, through the use of found footage, fast editing, and electronic pop, is fascinating. Whatever doubts I may have about the way in which these theories converge, you could not pull my eyes or ears away from this. My main criticism is that it seems lost in the past, as if 10 years are missing.

Curtis explores the ways in which our understanding and use of machines informs our conception of humanity. With a heavy dose of found footage, interviews, and atmospheric music, Curtis weaves together a profoundly pessimistic and convincing account of the contemporary human experience. The film gets a bit scattered in its final third, but Curtis' film leaves a strong impression in favor of the uniqueness of humanity.

You'd have to be an ultra-conservative capitalist or just a plain moron not to appreciate the message here or at least the slick way Curtis presents it to us.

A bit less solid than Curtis earlier work, but still very solid and with an incredibly interesting visual style.

It throws a lot of information at you, but I feel it does it in such a way that you can understand. It's always interesting, and I know these movies get praised for how informative they are (and it is informative) but I think the soundtrack was a nice touch, especially the NIN song (I'm not even a fan of NIN, but I like the instrumental songs).

Some eloquent white guilt here, or maybe genetic guilt as well as more poetic links between content than has been previously explored. Always a fan of the layout of Curtis's essays, he arrives at his conclusions with thorough backing from both the melange of archive footage and his own research. The Collective affair is a bizarre ideological orgy.

A bit looser than The Trap but expands upon the same points, orienting towards genetics. Rather than coming to a definitive conclusion, Curtis raises questions about the apathy derived from being unable to challenge the networks of power that constantly transform and corrupt, or our proclivity to look out for ourselves to the detriment of others. The story of George Price is the definition of harsh.

Much in the vein of Curtis' other work, how the invention and propagation of ideas has resulted in the dominance of new ideologies. I especially like this series, though, as its ideas on how the metaphor of machinery has affected our understanding of the economy, of nature, and even of man demonstrates the easily obscured power of analogic cognition.