Rating: ****
Memes? D-Dos’ed? 4chan? Lol Cat? To the
average ludite, a stroll through the world of We Are Legion might be a
bit like taking a trip to Wonderland without knowing how to speak the language.
One wrong turn and you’re eating cakes that make you shrink and taking advice
from hookah-smoking caterpillars that nearly gets your head chopped off.
We Are Legion explores the impact and evolution of Anonymous. Labelled by some as
cyber-terrorists, others as merry pranksters, and others still as the defensive
wing of the internet, it naturally occurs that Anonymous is none of those things,
and all of them. And then maybe a bit more. Director Brian Knappenberger
follows what was once a loose coalition of net-savvy users sharing the weird
and outrageous on a message board called 4chan, and traces it through its
activist incarnation as the legions of the Anonymous take on Scientology,
defend Wikileaks, and rise to still greater prominence even as its original
members splinter.
I think Knappenberger does a couple of
things very smart. While his admiration for Anonymous is apparent, he doesn’t
present this as a smirky fan boy rendering of “look how clever these guys are
and you’re not.” There is some very fair analysis in We Are Legion, and Knappenberger
does more than fetish the Guy Fawkes mask (though I wonder if he was able to,
or even considered, taking to V for Vendetta creators Alan Moore and
Dave Gibbons). The other thing that Knappenberger does well is work within the
parameters of Anonymous, which is the anonymity of several of its members.
Scene after scene of talking heads hidden behind one type of mask or another as
seen through a Skype connection could have made the doc technically jump the
shark, but Knappenberger handles the mixed mediums well.
It’s a testament to just how well trusted Knappenberger
was by the people of Anonymous that he was able to get these comments in the
first place, but to reiterate, I don’t think We Are Legion is a glowing
piece of propaganda for the group. Knappenberger tackles the good and the bad,
the benefits and the demerits, and the potential good of Anonymous and previous
actions that don’t reflect well on them moving forward. We Are Legion may
not prompt you to remake yourself as a hacktivist, but it will give you a
greater, more detailed appreciation of the culture.
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