All Light, Everywhere

This waste of time disguising as a documentary is really a 90 minutes infomercial for the company that makes Tasers & Body-Cams, peppered with 20 more minutes of random facts about the history of Photography. The movie has no point of view, is incoherent at best and tries way too hard to appear smart.

It does not leave the viewer with any discovery other than realizing how rich the owner of the Taser/Bodycam company must be (with 89% of the market) and how amazing it is that he got this free publicity from this blatant informercial disguised as a pseudo-documentary. No bad consequences, side-effects or negative effects on humanity or on society are even presented.

The only time I thought this movie was FINALLY going to get somewhere was late in the film when a few members of a community (in Baltimore i believe) are voicing their concerns about possibly being spied on by an airplane surveillance camera taking pictures of their neighborhood 24-7. But then, next scene, the City of Baltimore Police do chose to go ahead (A pilot test they say) with this intrusive surveillance system anyway, so who cares what the concerns of community folks.

Boring. Audio hurt my ears at certain points. Overall I'm annoyed that I wasted my time watching this. Read some other of the low star reviews for more details about any this was a stinker.

For such a fascinating topic, this "documentary" manages to create 110 minutes of the most uninspired, dull, and pretentious content imaginable.

Except for the fascinating excerpts of parts of the history of photography, it tries so hard to be profound, to weave broad narratives, to write an erudite documentary essay, that it just comes across as pompous and dull.

There is almost no intelligent commentary or narrative here, or insights. A total and utter waste of time!

Adages such as 'the Observer Changes the Experiment' sum up this insightful reflection on the limitations of perspective.

As a camera operator and documentary filmmaker myself, I can say that it is easy to confuse what is captured in the lens with the reality. But the map is not the territory, and the image is not the object in question.

Instead, as Theo Anthony's film explains, it is something of a parallax problem -- the position of the observer -- and indeed one's position in authority, as with law enforcement in this film, alters or at least CAN alter what is "seen" in the image.

It's just about accountability and openness, but about understanding the position of observation -- making an apt (but admittedly obscure) metaphor with the Transit of Venus -- a textbook case of parallax perspective-shift.

Parallax (noun) 2. An apparent displacement of an object observed, due to real displacement of the observer, so that the direction of the former with reference to the latter is changed.

Seeing and being seen in an increasingly surveillance- and sousveillance-oriented society cannot account for all the human factors. Bias is built in and hard to strip away.

We have a tendency to take things for granted - i.e. "what you see is what you get" -- but the human eye does not take in the real world, and the brain and its functions remain completely isolated from that real world.

And thus, symbols are substituted in mental calculations, assumptions driving thinking and decision making.. and the questions of morality, justice, fairness and more are mired in the complex questions surrounding the meta-field of Cybernetics dating back to the 50s. My film "The Minds of Men" (2018) covers similar topics from a totally different perspective.

But my interest in the material I have research primed me for the appreciation of Theo Anthony's' fine film. It requires time to digest and think it over, and some audiences don't have energy for that, but a thoughtful viewer will have a lot to walk away with from this rich film.

From the very beginning, All Light, Everywhere lets you know that it will demand your undivided attention for its entire run time. It's informative, philosophical, and aesthetically pleasing. The story is about cameras, scientific measurement, human sense, and their limitations to discern reality. The story is primarily told through the lens of the modern surveillance state and its application in law enforcement. All Light, Everywhere is unlike a traditional documentary. Approach it as a Sundance award-winning film.