"Disconnect" - Review

“Disconnect” – Review

“Disconnect” is part dramatic film, part expose and part two hour eavesdropping - fly on the wall experience on the ever growing consequences (both good and bad) of how modern technology and social media together are affecting and defining our daily relationships with people we love, we generally know and sometimes we really don’t know at all.

The film revolves around 4 group stories.  One is a career obsessed lawyer who is inseparable from his cell phone on his daily job leaving him unintentionally alienated and unable to communicate with any degree of normalcy with his family. The second is a couple inadvertently drawn into a dangerous situation when they experience a criminal invasion of all of their finances and personal identity information largely from social media outlets online. The third is a widowed ex-cop who struggles to raise his mischievous son who cyber-bullies a classmate. And the forth revolves mostly around an ambitious and glaringly naïve journalist seeking a career making story involving underage teens involved in the online adult-only sex sites.

Disconnect for about 90% of the film makes a strong cogent and sound case that the more reliance and greater emphasis technology takes root into our personal lives, the more it starts to almost inhabit some strand within our DNA where we become emotionally altered in as to who we really are, just as evolution does in the natural world altering a certain species legs to adapt to changing conditions in order to survive.

More importantly, the film suggests that we are in fact sacrificing something as we increasingly stop talking to each other and relying more on devices to talk through one another.  Unfortunately, it could be those naturally evolved qualities that tends to bind us all together, honed by a myriad of life long face to face encounters that emanate more delicate, sophisticated, palatable and virtuous responses on matters of intimacy, kindness, joy, sadness, heart ache and happiness.

So is the “Disconnect” from technology taking on equal parts aid and intruder in our lives?  Are we slowly devolving into emotionally atrophied dysfunctional souls left perilously overexposed and psychologically naked? Will technology stunt us in some way leaving us able only to communicate through more the primordial and impulsive traits of rage, revenge, debauchery, decadence, scandal and crime? If so, when does it stop? The film makes the case we seem at every innovative turn to readily welcome it’s every application and advancement with zealot like fervor; where the technology itself becomes both a comforting symbiotic friend and an emotional surrogate crutch to our most basic and simplest routine need.

You should at some point make the effort to watch this film, even though for me the last 10 minutes of the film disappointed me a bit as it felt more like a slapped on rushed convoluted soap opera finale. Still it’s a film I found thought provoking about how computers, the internet, cell phones and social media are in our daily lives just like real family.

3 –1/4   Stars