I Am (2011)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: I Am is undeniably well-meaning - and unfortunately proof that a filmmaker's best intentions aren't enough to guarantee a worthwhile viewing experience.
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Critic Reviews for I Am
All Critics (47) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (17) | Rotten (30)
Whatever leaps of logic yawn in the film's poorly cobbled-together arguments are papered over by its wash of button-pushing images, from regimented soldiers and deadly explosions to flocks of wild geese and sunbeams breaking through the clouds.
What "I Am" is wanting is a sense that it actually wrestles with anything, that it can stand up to a contrary point of view that the film's 76 minutes are so utterly lacking.
I Am is looking for a little bit of hope in this world. Happily, it finds some. A great deal actually.
An open heart can be a recipe for ridicule, particularly in a culture where consumption is mistaken for a moral imperative.
Happily, the frisky Shadyac does not sermonize. He is a puckish Sherpa to the frontiers of science and faith.
It's hard to decide what rankles most: what an astonishing monument to Shadyac's self-absorption I Am is, or how flat-out bad -- incompetent, even -- the filmmaking is.
Audience Reviews for I Am
Famed comedic director Tom Shadyac's entry in to documentary filmmaking is an interesting one. With I Am, his scope is big-- a dissection of the world's problems, the mechanisms behind those problems, and the solutions to them. Through interviews with scientists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders, he paints a rather broad canvass that spans from philosophical to metaphysical. What I felt I Am was weak in was its presentation of talking heads and their insights in to the world's problems. Many obvious things were said, "poverty", "way", "hunger", yet there wasn't much of a dissection in to those specific issues. Saying, for example, that capitalism is exaggerates these problems is politically correct, yet logically unfound. The film contained too many of these large pronouncements, which distracted from what the film did right. It simply stated many things as fact without backing them up--what about, for example, the higher standard of living produced by capitalistic nations in comparison to the more "egalitarian" governments? The strongest part of I AM was, undoubtedly, the exploration of quantum theory and some of the new revelations that have come to light. The power of consciousness and its relation to reality is immense, and the film did a good job explaining this. Had the film focused more on this, and less on the platitudes, it would have been all the stronger. Overall, thought-provoking, but uneven. 3/5 Stars
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