W.I.S.O.R.

This was such a disappointment. I had watched a documentary on streaming about the history of steam in Manhattan where they touched on the steam hammers that rupture the pipes. When I came across this documentary, I was excited to see the "fix"...What I got instead was a fluff filled waste of time. As I said, this could have been a 20 minute documentary, but instead you have to suffer through the engineers babbling about everything not about the robot.

By far, the most annoying thing is the robot voice that is so painful I had to fast forward the documentary... which, in the end, made this a 20 minute viewing for me, so I guess I win after all.

"W. I. S. O. R." is easily the most aggravating documentary ever made. It's more performance art than educational film. At times it resembles a museum short. At others, it resembles an industrial commercial for the robotics firm. Neither is the kiss of death. What kills "W. I. S. O. R." is its attempt to wed a nuts and bolts episode of "Extreme Engineering" with a pretentious, music video speculation on the future of intelligent machines...from the machine's point of view, no less!!! Anyone expecting to learn about mechanical engineering will be disappointed. The poor guys who exposed themselves for this documentary must be mortified that they were exploited by such a self-indulgent director. P. U.!

The film W.I.S.O.R fails on many levels: The film is full of standard New York City film footage that has nothing to do with the robot. Rather than have footage of the engineers talking about the project the filmmaker shows them talking about god, baseball and American attitudes. A film about designing a robot that work in steam pipes should be full of graphics; instead only a single graphic of the robot inching along a pipe is shown over and over again.

The filmmaker tried to jazz up the film my added a robot voice that simply repeats what the engineers have previously said. The videotape of the engineers working on the project kept switching between color and black and white.

The film ends with the robot being loaded on a truck and sent somewhere leaving the viewer to decide if the thing ever worked at all.

As an engineer, I was fascinated by the concept of W.I.S.O.R., so I checked this movie out of the NetFlix library in spite of the member reviews I had read.

In spite of all of Michel Negroponte's efforts to obscure anything about the project that might be interesting, I did enjoy the few nuggets that escaped his attention.

I suspect that, perhaps after viewing his raw footage, Michel Negroponte decide that the material was too dry for his intended audience (whoever they may be) and decided to "cheese it up". Whatever his reasons, he did a great disservice to his subjects: W.I.S.O.R., the Engineers who built it, the visionaries at Con. Ed. who funded the project, and the city of New Yourk itself.

I sincerely hope that, some day, another director will undertake the story of W.I.S.O.R. and tell it in a straightforward fashion.

Until that happens, please, please, please do not see this movie!