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 — strive on Kernel’s diagnostic helmets that monitor blood focus within the mind, highlighting energetic areas with colour. Yuste exams the helmets by telling an “outrageous” lie and seeing how his mind lights up. However essentially the most outrageous factor he can suppose to say is that 5 plus 5 is 11, and the mind pictures don’t mild up in any significant approach. That anticlimax encapsulates a lot of the movie, which is ostensibly in regards to the know-how’s capability to light up the mysteries and prolong 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 newbie 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 growing older and defy demise itself, usually 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 varied specialists in regards to the evolving state of neuroscience and the various prospects 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 sensible in mild of its origins as a partnership between Herzog and Yuste’s Neurorights Basis. The movie is just not fairly an commercial for the muse, but it surely does appear guided by Yuste and his cohort’s considerations about topics like authorized protections for folks’s psychological knowledge.
This, in fact, begs the query of whether or not we’ll ever actually have the potential to show human thought into readable knowledge 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 usually appear out of his depth within the movie, and too keen to let his topics make questionable claims with out pushing again or delving deeper into what their ambitions and fears counsel about themselves and/or society. I’m additionally at a loss to elucidate the inclusion of sure segments, like a sitdown with well-known World Commerce Heart wire-walker Philippe Petit. The person’s not uninteresting, however we’re not studying something in regards to the mind from him.
Herzog, nevertheless, 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 gadget. And his much-memed type of narration is as engrossing as ever — there’s one thing deeply compelling about the best way he says phrases like “Mormon” and “Siri” in his dulcet Bavarian cadence. Nonetheless, the movie doesn’t evince the form 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 Avenue, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) by means of December 26, 2026, and can display at different choose theaters nationwide within the coming months.