Das Institut

Like a lot of people, I watched this after the terrific tv series dispatches from elsewhere.

This is presumably a documentary about the real-life alternate reality game that inspired the series. And at first, it's pretty interesting, as it interviews participants and creators.

When I read user reviews, they would complain it wasn't a real documentary, and at first I thought they were being too demanding. I thought, maybe it's fudging things a bit, since it's made by people involved in teh ARG, but it still seemed reasonable.

But as it goes along, this blurring of the real and the illusion, while true, I suppose, to the spirit of the ARG, means that this fails as a documentary because you don't feel you've really learned much. But it also fails as fiction, because much of it is incredibly boring.

Ultimately, this is just a really self-indulgent film that fails on multiple levels. Which is a shame, because I think something interesting could have been made out of the experience. But then, I guess that's what dispatches from elsewhere was - the interesting thing they finally got out of the event.