Directing: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine is ostensibly a critical, yet beautiful, look at the history of the camera: from still photographs to moving pictures, from an hours-long process to capture one image to a world rife with photographic immersion. We’re meant to learn, I suppose, how the camera over time has influenced and distorted how we see what is in front of our very eyes.

And is is undeniably, deeply fascinating, especially for a film without any overt narrative beyond the very passage of time, from the first-ever photograph, taken in France in 1826, to the mass-media digital world we live in today. I just wish this film had a little more in the way of insight.

And the King Said is of a certain type of documentary film, assembled as a collage meant to convey the “big picture”—no pun intended—on a particular concept, without intercutting to talking heads, or anyone attempting to contextualize for us. This films jumps far back and forth through time, taking select images, or clips from YouTube or TikTok, and then jumping back to certain breakthroughs like the series of photographs proving horses have moments of all four hooves above the ground when they run, or the famous film of a train that was the first motion picture shown to large audiences.

If there’s any problem with And the King Said, it’s that it attempts to convey far too much in far too little time—all of 88 minutes, to be exact, to cover nearly two hundred years of history. And although the instinct on the part of co-directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck to tilt heavily toward coverage of the explosion of digital photography in the 21st century makes sense, the resulting effect is a series of random images that hardly feels like any random deep dive into Flickr or YouTube or Instagram. The film notes how many millions of photos are published every minute, which only makes one wonder how they chose all the images they include in this particular edit. There’s a million other edits that could have had exactly the same effect, and if you think too much about that, it dilutes whatever meaning this film is supposed to have.

I would have liked to see more time spent on watershed moments in the advancement of photography before the 21st century, and how those jumps in technological evolution insidiously infected the public consciousness. The paradigm-shifting advancement of television, for example, gets all but a few minutes of time, even though had a movie of exactly this sort been made in, say, 1995, it likely would have spent most of its time on that.

To be fair, And the King Said has some pretty sobering moments. There’s the award-winning photograph of a dead little girl in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, juxtaposed with a photo of the line of photojournalists all squatting to take her picture. (It could be argued it’s the latter shot that really deserves an award.) There’s the clip of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram exactly the same way any of us do, which, for me at least, caused some real cognitive dissonance.

And I have to admit, this film had me thinking about whether I should improve my life by deleting all of my social media. The science used in these apps’ algorithms dates back further than you think, when research was done decades ago to find out what interested people most, and content producers bought the data. Of course, I am far too addicted to TikTok or even online streaming platforms like HBO Max to have any hope of escaping their clutches. And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine offers a window into how we got here, where a company like Netflix can use simple computing to know our interests better than we know them ourselves.

That said, if that is the point of And the King Said, maybe the filmmakers should have been more explicit about that. I went in expecting a history of the camera and its effects on society—and there is some of that; one fascinating sequence shows people’s brains being broken by a demonstration of how cameras work, which is the exact same way our eyesight works, and is both incredibly simple and something I am unable to explain.

I guess you could call this film more of a meditation. If it had a mantra, though, it would be connected far more to very recent years, when we get viral videos of a woman doing sexy poses with a plush hamburger, or a group of amateur idiots get death-defying shots of a young woman being hung over the side of a skyscraper. Don’t even get me started on the guy who is driven crazy by viewers of his constant livestream who are going out of their way to cause chaos in his life, but for some reason he continues to livestream, including a stream of his rant against his viewers. You do have other options, sir.

But, maybe that’s the point: it’s easy to say there are options, and quite another to choose any of the other options, in a world optimized for engagement. It would be easy to get into a bit of an existential funk after watching this movie. Personally, I prefer to complain about its lack of narrative focus.

*Apparently all photography roads led to this.*

Overall: B