a review of

five star story told in like two and a half star fashion. this just exemplifies the netflix drive to create and sell "content". the one compliment i will give this documentary is that it lands like an actual documentary. it doesn't come off as biased like almost all modern "documentaries" do. it lets the words of the subjects speak for themselves. it's not a great documentary, for example, we hear a whole bunch of rah rah copaganda about how they always get the "bad guys". (the cops are morons and only cracked this case because the bunker crew was dumb enough to run an unvetted volunteer program...aaannnddd award for worst opsec in world history goes to whoever the heck came up with that idea.) we also have an "interview" with xennt which is not even remotely an interview and is just a speech. the documentary mostly manages to stay away from blunders like this though. the downfall of this documentary are the incredibly weak recreations that are like right out of a 90s made for tv documentary. very, very weak and uninteresting. it shows that the interviews they managed to conduct didn't come up with that much interesting material, pointing to hilariously bad interviewing skills. these guys are a goldmine of interesting material and you couldn't get enough lines out of them to make a film? it also wasn't clear which footage was real and which wasn't. in the beginning they say all the footage is a recreation, and then a lot of the footage says "origninal police footage"...which is it? commentary on the subjects and subject matter...these guys are madmen. to think they could operate like this and not attract law enforcement attention...ridiculous. they also are not wrong. the internet needs to remain free. the moment you let the government run surveillance to decide who can do what on the internet, the whole internet becomes a gigantic surveillance machine. (this is the modern internet. it is already nearly impossible to do anything on the internet without being tracked. it is terrifying to an extent that is now well past almost all dystopian futuristic surveillance state fiction that's ever been written. privacy is dying, or likely already dead, we need to fight back.) yes, this means that "bad people" will also get to do "bad things" on the internet, but the alternative is an inescapable surveillance state where the government knows literally everything you do inside and outside your own home. take your pick, i know which side i'm on.