There is a beautiful moment in the too-brief trailer for Lo and Behold: toward the end of the clip, a scientist addresses a man with a camera. He says, “Will there ever be an artificially intelligent machine that makes movies? Absolutely, yes. Will they be quite as good as yours? No one can even come close.” “Of course not,” says the man with the camera. It is, of course, Werner Herzog.
Lo and Behold is his look at the creation and ramifications of this wild thing we call the internet, though it goes beyond that, touching on technology in general and the way the waves of cell towers have proliferated the world at large. This includes a woman who fled from civilization because of those “harmful” waves, a family who insists that the internet is the work of the devil, and a group of monks who stand idly around with their smartphones in hand, perhaps, as Herzog observes, tweeting rather than meditating.
It looks to be another killer doc from Herzog, who has, in the past few decades, established himself as one of the masters of the medium. The film is set to premiere in theaters, On Demand, on Amazon Video, and on iTunes come July 8.
Watch the trailer below. It might be the funniest thing you see all day.