All Light, Everywhere

This could have been shortened to about 5 minutes if they put everything worth watching into a few clips. You might get to the end of this and really regret sitting there, thinking about the lack of talent of the writers and, to a degree, the videographers.

What was the point of the documentary? It's largely a puff piece publicity prop for the Taser company and their body cameras for police.

Sure, it's nice to hear again about the 30 second buffer at the start of police body cam recordings, and this explains that so that the average citizen knows what is going on with police body cameras, but if you value MY time, and you have ANY ability to edit, condense this down to about one fifteenth as long please.

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.

Covers a small handful of subjects related to photography, criminology, and surveillance, but frustratingly spends most of its time on the least interesting ones. Whenever it picks up on something good that stimulates curiosity, that is too soon dropped and it returns to tedious scenes repeatedly featuring a corporate salesman, and boring police training sessions. It has about three important questions to ask, and asks far more that are really not fully formed. Even the good questions raised are not direct, but more like "how does the future see the past?" or "what do we see when we see a picture?" In other words, woolly-headed academic or philosophical matters which the film should clarify or provide some insight into, but instead just drops in unexamined because they sound important and might add some plausible weight to the emptiness. Seems to be a critique of surveillance technology and an indictment of capitalism's effort to sell its way out of societal failure, but I am reading that into it, as nothing is explicitly stated or advocated for in this film. As others have said, it is slow and boring. The historical snippets are great, but they make up roughly ten percent of the screen time. Not very good film making, not an illuminating documentary, just trying to seem that way and coming up very short. Aesthetically, the annoying, loud, spacey music, long dull shots, and ponderously lazy writing and editing make this a chore. Needed a lot more thought and work before release.

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.