The oceans - another frontier whose depths have only begun to be plumbed - becomes a subtheme. Herzog draws a beaming smile from Darío Gil, IBM’s head of research, when, after a tour of the quantum-computer lab, he asks him about fishing. Such moments bring to the fore the unspoken challenge that courses through the film: Could a brain-computer interface conjure such emotion, such unexpected chords of sweet, awkward, lovely feeling? , and catches them off guard with his questions about music, and dinner conversation, and the possibility of communicating with animals. We can’t see what’s on the screen or hear what they’re saying, but their unforced camaraderie hints at the spontaneous bursts of tenderness that punctuate the doc - as when Herzog interviews Cori Bargmann and Richard Axel, scientists who are married to each other.
It’s also a trenchant, deeply felt warning: When computers can extract information directly from the brain or feed commands straight into it, privacy, autonomy and the very sense of self are at stake.įor all the unease over ethical questions, the film opens with a pastoral sense of calm: Side by side on a rock beneath trees in brilliant full leaf, Herzog and neurobiologist Rafael Yuste, the film’s chief scientific adviser, gaze at a laptop.
The possibility of afterlife communication is one of the what-ifs Herzog asks the experts to ponder, his questions driving the documentary’s progression from interview to interview, synapse to synapse.Īs Theater peers beneath the skull - its only literal glimpse at the pulsating gray matter is a brief one - the movie is as steeped in metaphysics as it is in brain science. Crucially, he includes a clip from a Soviet-era silent film, Earth, that captures a character at the brink of death Another character wants him to report back from the other side. For good measure, he spends quality time in the Catskills with a renowned high-wire artist.
(Both films were edited with crisp precision by Marco Capalbo.) Herzog’s interviewees are entrepreneurs, mathematicians, surgeons, philosophers.
Like his 2020 doc, Fireballa film that studied meteors through chemistry, geology and mythology, entering the kind of territory Joseph Campbell called the inner reaches of outer space, Theater of Thought navigates the places where science and poetics diverge, entwine and sometimes fuse.