The top reviews here give a good report on what is moving, exciting and thought-provoking about this documentary, so I will instead briefly focus on some of the shortcomings.
The set-up of the tale is very good, and the excitement of the brothers discovering each of them exists is most compelling, but once they introduce the idea that something more is going on, there's a feeling that they are inflating with movie techniques a story that is not as shocking or sinister or conspiratorial as they are hoping to make it appear. It's clear they are trying for a similar rug-pull effect as used in 'The Jinx' and other recent crime documentaries, but those tools feel a little out of place with the actual material at hand. A more sober discussion of the pluses and minuses of the morality of research carried out on human beings might have been more fitting.
The other big gripe is the heavy handed message at the end of the film, presented cinematically as some big reveal, that it is nurture, not nature, that shapes our lives, even though this goes completely against ALL of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary we've watched for the previous 90 minutes.
It's really quite hard to figure out why this was inserted here: if one of three triplets kills himself, that doesn't mean the thousand other eerie similarities all three share are suddenly discounted or explained away. If they'd simply said 'obviously it's a bit of both', that would have been one thing, but the blank statement being presented as the final conclusion of what we've just seen really weakens the film, and our trust in its makers.
The overall impression is that the filmakers didn't really know where the story was going to go, and that it didn't wind up where they thought it would. Other than that it was an interesting story to find out about and another solid addition to the growing body of notable 21st century docs.
The set-up of the tale is very good, and the excitement of the brothers discovering each of them exists is most compelling, but once they introduce the idea that something more is going on, there's a feeling that they are inflating with movie techniques a story that is not as shocking or sinister or conspiratorial as they are hoping to make it appear. It's clear they are trying for a similar rug-pull effect as used in 'The Jinx' and other recent crime documentaries, but those tools feel a little out of place with the actual material at hand. A more sober discussion of the pluses and minuses of the morality of research carried out on human beings might have been more fitting.
The other big gripe is the heavy handed message at the end of the film, presented cinematically as some big reveal, that it is nurture, not nature, that shapes our lives, even though this goes completely against ALL of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary we've watched for the previous 90 minutes.
It's really quite hard to figure out why this was inserted here: if one of three triplets kills himself, that doesn't mean the thousand other eerie similarities all three share are suddenly discounted or explained away. If they'd simply said 'obviously it's a bit of both', that would have been one thing, but the blank statement being presented as the final conclusion of what we've just seen really weakens the film, and our trust in its makers.
The overall impression is that the filmakers didn't really know where the story was going to go, and that it didn't wind up where they thought it would. Other than that it was an interesting story to find out about and another solid addition to the growing body of notable 21st century docs.