Wormwood

This needed to be edited down. I value the gradual unveiling of information in the order it was revealed historically. That is how it unfolded for one affected family. There are way too many minutes of re-enactment, especially the rendering of details that the storytellers say are missing. At times, the re-enactment footage is re-used! Additional footage comes from productions of a Shakespeare tragedy. So it feels as if the Shakespeare OR the re-enactments would have been indulgence enough. Why feature both? I was curious. This answered some questions. Wish it had done so more quickly.

. . . also obvious, tiresome, repetitious, and low-rent. Long, moody pauses substitute for meaningful dialogue. The interviews are edited to draw attention to words that the filmmaker can then clumsily twist. The cinematography is weighed down by endlessly recycled special effects.

I binged-watched this in one evening mostly because I was afraid that if I stopped I would never go back and finish it. I gather that happened to others. But I had the time and in the end it was a great ride. The story moves from one theory to another about one man's death over the decades--and the final conclusion is that his murder can't be solved unless a whole lot of other ones are brought to light at the same time, as well as some very dark moments in America's past. That is a worthy theme for 4 1/2 hours. As the story moves on, you realize that the collages of news stories, photographs (e.g. of actual people mixed up or jigsawed into the actors who play them in the re-enactments) and places are deeply tied into the story: the main character, Eric Olson, began making collages after his father's death and later developed a method for using collages to help traumatized people deal with their experiences. It seems to me that this method fits well with Morris's style, and the rhythms of the images can be very beautiful. Eric lost track of this work, apparently moved back into the house he lived in as a child, and talks at the end about having lost himself in his search for the truth about his father. He remains however extremely articulate and persuasive. In a sense, the film itself redeems Eric and his father by exposing the secrets they wanted known.

I saw in the Netflix clip "MK Ultra" so I was curious to watch this as my grandmother was one of the victims in Canada for this CIA experiment. But the editing was horrible, I couldn't bring myself to watch one episode. I agree with the other reviewers. The subject is like a 45 minute documentary and get a new editor. I guess I'm going to have to find and watch "The Sleep Room", which got a pretty decent ratings.

It is such a shame because the story is very interesting and an important one to tell. Especially today when people in general and the united press corps in particular are busy fawning over US intelligence services, heralding them as virtually immaculate purveyors of truth. It's as if their shady past, MKUltra in the case of this documentary or the Iraq war in more recent memory, has been thrown down the memory hole and we are now to trust their word implicitly. There is an excellent 90 minute documentary hiding in this material. But Netflix (as usual) drags it out for far too long. Was there really a need for this documentary to be six episodes long? It boggles the mind that this documentary was made by the fantastic documentary filmmaker who did Standard Operating Procedure, A Brief History of Time and The Thin Blue Line, not to mention my personal favorites Mr. Death and especially The Fog of War.