Early in Werner Herzog’s new documentary Theater of Thought (2024), we meet Bryan Johnson, a enterprise capitalist invested in quite a lot of science firms who based the neurotech agency Kernel. We see Johnson and neuroscientist Rafael Yuste — who acts as Herzog’s cohost at occasions within the movie — attempt on Kernel’s diagnostic helmets that monitor blood focus within the mind, highlighting lively areas with coloration. Yuste exams the helmets by telling an “outrageous” lie and seeing how his mind lights up. However probably the most outrageous factor he can suppose to say is that 5 plus 5 is 11, and the mind pictures don’t gentle up in any significant means. That anticlimax encapsulates a lot of the movie, which is ostensibly concerning the know-how’s capability to light up the mysteries and lengthen the capability of the human mind.
Johnson is an ideal character for Herzog, who constructed his profession profiling colourful figures, starting from a former prisoner of struggle who revisits the websites of his seize in Little Dieter Must Fly (1997) to an ill-fated beginner bear conservationist in Grizzly Man (2005). Sadly, you wouldn’t know this from Theater of Thought. Herzog describes Johnson in voiceover as “colorful,” however doesn’t disclose that he’s on an obsessive, quixotic quest to reverse getting old and defy demise itself, typically by means of scientifically questionable means. As a substitute, the movie leaves him behind, following Herzog and Yuste on a highway journey to talk with numerous consultants concerning the evolving state of neuroscience and the numerous potentialities new know-how gives the sector.
Movie nonetheless of Theater of Thought (2024), directed by Werner Herzog
The film’s common looseness and heavy reliance on interview-based vignettes is smart in gentle of its origins as a partnership between Herzog and Yuste’s Neurorights Basis. The movie isn’t fairly an commercial for the muse, however it does appear guided by Yuste and his cohort’s issues about topics like authorized protections for individuals’s psychological information.
This, after all, begs the query of whether or not we’ll ever really have the potential to show human thought into readable information within the first place. When IBM Vice President Dario Gil explains quantum computing, Herzog speaks over him in narration to confess he has no concept what Gil is saying and that he suspects the viewers doesn’t both. It’s a hilarious second, pure Herzog, however he does typically appear out of his depth within the movie, and too prepared to let his topics make questionable claims with out pushing again or delving deeper into what their ambitions and fears recommend about themselves and/or society. I’m additionally at a loss to clarify the inclusion of sure segments, like a sitdown with well-known World Commerce Middle wire-walker Philippe Petit. The person’s not uninteresting, however we’re not studying something concerning the mind from him.
Herzog, nonetheless, sprinkles in sufficient grace notes to make Theater of Thought stand out. Few others would spend an prolonged period of time capturing world-renowned mind scientist Christof Koch undergo his morning rowing routine earlier than talking with him, or muse on the shortcomings of brain-scanning know-how by declaring how a useless fish confirmed cognitive exercise on one machine. And his much-memed fashion of narration is as engrossing as ever — there’s one thing deeply compelling about the way in which he says phrases like “Mormon” and “Siri” in his dulcet Bavarian cadence. Nonetheless, the movie doesn’t evince the type of philosophical resonance or sheer weirdness that we all know Herzog is able to.
Movie nonetheless of Theater of Thought (2024), directed by Werner Herzog
Movie nonetheless of Theater of Thought (2024), directed by Werner Herzog
Theater of Thought (2024), directed by Werner Herzog, is screening at Movie Discussion board (209 West Houston Road, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) by means of December 26, 2026, and can display at different choose theaters nationwide within the coming months.
