Two hours of my life I won’t get back, or more appropriately, two hours I could have spent more profitably surfing the web. Werner Herzog’s subtitled “Reveries of the Connected World” was a bunch of “reveries,” all right, but there wasn’t much connection. Herzog is one of my all-time favorite directors, and his sense of open wonder is usually refreshing, but here it came across as naivete, if not ignorance, as he asked his internet-savvy subjects such unhelpful questions as, “Do computers dream?” and “Could your soccer-playing robot discs beat Brazil?” The common thread through Herzog cinema is the oddball, and that continued here, in spades. On one end of the spectrum were the fruitcakes, cited as examples of the Internet’s harmful effects; on the other were computer geniuses, who only appeared odd because Herzog clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Anyone who went to this movie hoping to understand what the Internet is or how it works would walk out as baffled as ever. Anyone who was already worried about the fate of our civilization, however, would have added another potential cataclysm to fret: solar flares.
