Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Whitech It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Lance Le Bombarded with images, sounds, and ideas that at times overgeneralizes and in other instances create bizarre connections, Curtis's documentary is deceptive, its true purpose buried in impressive editing and storytelling. This documentary is not actually a documentary, but is a story about how stories take on lives of their own and infect the imaginations of many human beings, especially those whose influence on the world makes the infections all the more dangerous.Flitting from idea to idea, Curtis weaves a narrative by linking somewhat disparate topics and attempts to convince us, the viewers, that his story is true. The world has been manipulated by an elite via computer networks. The idea of a balance in nature contributes to our misguided attempts at understanding nature. We become machines ourselves in the subjugation and erroneous divisions of colonized territories. But ah, these are just stories.Be careful of stories and ideas, Curtis warns, for they have a habit of dictating reality. In presenting us a somewhat plausible explanation of various events in recent history, he presents a story that may or may not be wholly factual, but satisfies that conspiracy theorist lurking underneath us all. The possibility of us accepting a "story" for "fact" is perhaps the essential point of this documentary. So when viewing All Watched Over, be mindful of that you are watching is simply a narrative about how narratives, if taken too religiously, could have terrible consequences.

vincent-27 I agree with a lot of what has been written about this documentary, but I think some people miss the point. The documentary starts out being almost a Terminator inspired sub-title "The rise of the machines" and describes all the evil machines, but at the end the conclusion is *we* are the machines, the our DNA is the program. Viewed in that light, computers are mere extensions of ourselves and in a way are an attempt to make the computational abilities of the brain more perfect. There are still many, many things the organic brain can do better than a computer, subtle things like social intelligence, body language, emotional intelligence. These are more difficult to encode in a computer because they don't follow the same rules as simply adding 1+1. It is clear evidence that we don't exactly understand the process ourselves, which is why we can't program it into a computer.As I watched this documentary, I was floored by the similarities to a audibook I was listening to by the Dalai Lahma which talked about altruism and how it fits into the selfish gene model. Obviously Dalai Lahma takes a very different view on altruism, believing that it represents a higher function of human existence that cannot be explained by Darwinian view of the selfish gene. This documentary takes the counter view that altruism is just another way of preserving the gene, but it stumbles a little bit by only giving altruistic examples where the individual sacrifices itself for the continuation of it's relatives or the destruction of non-relatives. What about altruistic acts which are for the benefit of non-relatives? There is no adequate scientific explanation for this, yet it happens continuously throughout history. Then again, perhaps it is just another form of insanity.In any case, this documentary is not about computers taking over the world, it is about the belief of HUMANS AS MACHINES and this BELIEF taking over the world. Curtis does not go back farther than Ayn Rand and the 1930s, but surely this idea started with Nietszche and Darwin. In fact then Rand said that Aristotle was the only philosopher that influenced her, I found that hard to believe, because her ideas sound very similar to Nietszche's. This struggle is often interpreted politically as right vs left, materialism vs idealism, capitalism vs socialism.When Curtis ventures into the realm of the online world, here too he stumbles, he attempts to show that "cyberspace" was developed to try and imitate the stable natural ecosystem, but in reality was extremely chaotic. Yes, the online world of blogs, email, texts and tweets can be a mess, but if you look at the growth of illegal downloading, this is surprisingly stable, coherent and efficient. This system of peer-to-peer downloading arose completely spontaneously, and has developed into an extremely reliable way of downloading content, which has built in self regulating processes. This is surprisingly similar to the way a natural ecosystem might develop, including the existence of viruses and anti-viruses.Even with all it's flaws, I can't help but be awe-struck by the Herculean and virtuosic editing techniques used by Curtis, and the unique and incredibly moving use of music to juxtapose against various images. It can be cliché to superimpose happy music over tragic images, but Curtis does it such a way that it just seems brilliant. It's like Tarantino meets David Attenborough meets Radiohead. I would be very surprised if Curtis chooses the music himself, it's hard to imagine someone with such a stuffy English accent could be so hip, but appearances can be deceiving.I highly encourage anyone seeing this to watch his other documentaries, they are all done in his trademark style, which is unique and, at least artistically, unmatched in the documentary world.

rgcustomer This miniseries claims to be about machines and how our use of them and misinterpretation of them has not led to the positive results we'd expected.And of course this is true. I majored in Computer Science, and yet my experiences in the "real world" developing and testing computer software have left me wondering whether this is what we, or at least I, ought to be doing, because it doesn't seem to be making anything better, and I can count the lives made worse by the software I worked on (working correctly). So I was perhaps one of the ideal viewers of this program.However, it doesn't seem to really get into the connection between computers and other machines, and the problems we've let them cause. Instead, he takes human failings, and notices that computers don't fix them, and then blames the computers and the thinking that led to them, for the original human problems. He also doesn't seem to give any credit for humans who correct past errors in thinking, which is a function of philosophy and science.The show seems to come off as fuzzily religious. The "villains" famous enough to already be known to the audience tend to be either atheist or frequent targets of religious fanatics. They are made guilty by association with genocide. It's a not-so-subtle propaganda, with the living accused not given any time to respond.Let me just say that the people who carried out the genocide carry the blame themselves. They believed foreigners who told them they were two separate people, despite their own history. They then decided it was OK to wipe each other out. Even if this idea of genocide came from the Belgians, which is unclear to me, they still accepted it and carried it out. That is their own doing, and is on them, nobody else.I've given this a score as high as 6 because I did find the stories of Ayn Rand and Africa to be interesting, aside from the rest of the content. I'll probably seek out more reliable sources to follow up on that information.

IonGheorghePetre I am a fan or Mr. Curtis' previous work but this documentary series was a disappointment for me.The thing I dislike the most is the biased and simple opinion on computers this documentary tries to promote. Apparently "computers" are powerful things that dehumanize our world, we put our faith in computers and they have failed us, completely ignoring the fact that computers are human made, human programmed and human controlled in every aspects. I expected a much more complex and realistic dissection of the topic.This idea is also poorly presented and motivated, for example when briefly talking about the internet, we are presented with the negative opinion of an early internet user, the scene is made in such a way as to suggest that indeed the internet is what that distressed user says. Similar to the cheap techniques a News program would use to influence the public opinion.Throughout the documentary I had the feeling that too much emphasis is put on the soundtrack and on the synchronizing of suggestive footage with music rather than actual relevant content and information.To summarize, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" is tendentious, the idea presented is overly simplified and biased. It gave me the impression it was a bad propaganda movie against computers.