Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s documentary The Great Hack opens with a sweeping and essentially meaningless drone shot. “Somewhere in Nevada” a sole title reads over the image of a city that sprawls across the desert in the shadow of a rather stubby mountain range. Tedium has already begun to set in as ominous strings fade in on the soundtrack and the film cuts to the opening of the Burning Man festival, where Brittany Kaiser—former business development director at notorious data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica—sets out to do whatever it is that privileged white people do at Burning Man.
The Great Hack turns an undeniably important series of political events into a two-hour look at a wealthy criminal lounging in pools and riding in Ubers. The doc fakes its viewers out, though, after its pointless Burning Man prologue, introducing us to Professor David Carroll, an expert in social media marketing whose interest in recovering the data profile Cambridge Analytica illegally compiled of him—as it did of most every American—is meant to form something like the film’s impetus. Carroll explains, in terms a tad too elementary for a digital-native audience, that he’s concerned with the effect that targeted misinformation campaigns directed at specific users are having on global democracy. Or, in his both too lofty and too simple words, “How did the dream of a connected world tear us apart?”
One of the answers to Carroll’s question is that very specific people—people like Brittany Kaiser—decided to use the internet for precisely that purpose. In voiceover, Carroll explains what Cambridge Analytica was and, in broad strokes, how its methods of data collection and analysis helped sway both the British EU referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Carroll’s explanation is illustrated with animated visualizations more concerned with appearing complex and sensational than they are with clearly presenting information. The corporate structure of Cambridge Analytica is presented with a conspiratorial air, as if the web of profile photos that the The Great Hack pieces together represents something far more nefarious and mysterious than a company’s personnel page.
In its first act, the documentary makes ample use of such CG animations, including a rather repetitive motif in which photographed objects appear to pixelate and float up into the sky. We understand well before the fifth time we see this effect the metaphor that all that’s real is moving willy-nilly into the cloud. But after Carroll makes it to London to sue Cambridge Analytica for his data, Amer and Noujaim more or less abandons him and his pedagogical approach for Kaiser, whom the filmmakers track down in Thailand, sipping a Mai Thai poolside. Kaiser is despicable, but The Great Hack appears to never tire of watching her stare pseudo-pensively out of car and airplane windows, or inventing new ways to rationalize her work for Cambridge, even as she turns state’s witness in Britain.
The film spends so much time lingering on the mini-dramas of Kaiser’s jet-set life—and so little time detailing exactly what it was that Cambridge Analytica did, or investigating how we might stop it from happening again—that one can conclude that in Kaiser the filmmakers believed they had found some kind of key to understanding our ongoing digitally fueled social catastrophe. The Great Hack befuddlingly includes a sequence in which Kaiser panics because she thinks she’s lost her passport on her way to Heathrow, only to find it seconds later in her bag. Why include such an insignificant moment—or, for that matter, other sequences of Kaiser simply en route somewhere or waiting for something? What Amer and Noujaim see in Kaiser remains elusive. In fact, this meandering documentary seems so invested in a rehabilitation of her image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.
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