This is a powerful documentary, no doubt. Very emotional and timely.
It takes a lot of courage to go down this road and work on such a project. Yes it's based on a best selling book, hence we know there's already an audience out there willing to watch it. But hey you still need to have people on camera talking: that's really hard to do and it's the greatest accomplishment of this documentary.
Pretty sure they had a solid legal team behind because they are not shy: they name names and... oh boy are they relevant names.
That said: this documentary shows the same shortcomings that I find over and over again, these days:
Having chapter titles on screen to break different scenes would have helped to better focus on the themes presented (eg power and corruption ; propaganda and censorship...)
It takes a lot of courage to go down this road and work on such a project. Yes it's based on a best selling book, hence we know there's already an audience out there willing to watch it. But hey you still need to have people on camera talking: that's really hard to do and it's the greatest accomplishment of this documentary.
Pretty sure they had a solid legal team behind because they are not shy: they name names and... oh boy are they relevant names.
That said: this documentary shows the same shortcomings that I find over and over again, these days:
- really fast paced and poorly edited: there is simply very little room to breath and to collect one's thoughts. Going in chronological order is obviously the best approach, but a recap every now and then was very much needed.
Having chapter titles on screen to break different scenes would have helped to better focus on the themes presented (eg power and corruption ; propaganda and censorship...)
- technical terms not explained in an understandable way: RNA, gain of function, gene editing and so on. The broll used throughout the documentary is generally cheap stock footage and it is useless. For this stuff either you have some props to use as an analogy by the guy talking or you get a decent animator to show that stuff on screen.
- there isnt a journey to follow: the starting point was inviting. We follow robert f kennedy in his quest to understand what happened to those agencies and to expose the bad stuff. We lost track of his journey after a while: too many events, dates, people talking.
- the free version I watched online had those terrible computer generated subtitles. Now considering the main host has speech issues (nothing incredibly crazy, but still) they do a disservice to the documentary. Good subtitles are a necessity nowadays.