There are few cinematic ambitions greater than wanting to make an audience better through the inclusion of a filmmaker’s work in their media diet. And writer/producer/director/cinematographer/editor Paulina Amador wishes to do such with this documentary; to transform viewers into more hyper-inquisitive beings, akin to interviewee Jason Padgee who purportedly became a maths whiz after a chance head injury. And to her credit, that is the effect created… in that it induces a celestial-sized headache trying to watch it.
Ostensibly starting as a look at the human capacity for genius and the machinations that hold it back (electronic, social, political), this truly starts with a New Age-friendly quote from Nikola Tesla, and opening narration that begins with the phrase “Imagine a world…”. I feel some woo comin’ on, cuz.
Indeed, over the course of its remarkably-compacted 80-minutes-and-change, Amador covers a wide range of topics from artificial intelligence to quantum mechanics to spirituality to time travel to a micro-exposé on feminist history, among many others. But there isn’t a central, cohesive idea that ties all of this together (the minimum requirement for a documentary of this nature). Instead, it’s as if Amador collected all the information she could grasp, then tried to glue them together in editing, as if a single word is enough to compile all these thematic avenues into a working atlas.
The way it intercuts science and New Age spirituality is cut from the same cloth as the infamous What The Bleep Do We Know!?, which also has connections to the cultish institution Ramtha’s School Of Enlightenment (boosted here, since J.Z. Knight herself is a interviewee here, rather than merely inspiring the former). However, it goes beyond the eye-rolling pseudoscience because it can’t even present it in a coherent fashion. It’s exhausting to sit through, not because of the sheer volume of topics that get brought up seemingly at random, but because of the sheer effort required to connect the dots across the vast gaps between those topics. It’s like a footrace where the track is more pothole than solid ground.
For a production so adamant about making the audience think for themselves, this sure has a lot of wannabe-programming sewn into its fabric. It’s the kind of film you’d get linked to in an email from your maiden aunt who frequents GodlikeProductions forums, with a subject line in all caps that includes something synonymous to ‘wake up’. Except it’s such an erratic overload of information that, rather than engaging, actual sleep is preferable.
A techno-sceptical feature that operates on near-literal hyperlinks, as if a single Wikirace was all the research that went into it, the most this film manages to do is simulate a stoner’s navel-gazing session, but without the nodding-off before it takes itself too seriously. It seemingly wants to make the audience into geniuses, but it only comes across like Amador wants to proclaim her own self-supposed genius to everyone in earshot.
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