The byline is "Bunker investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and follows the process of building and selling these structures to the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike." In fact, there's no investigation, and no following of any process(es). This is one of those documentaries in which the filmmaker has chosen not to narrate or provide any background whatsoever on her subjects, presuming to let them speak for themselves. Now, this isn't in itself a flaw; one can do quite well with this technique in the form of an "oral history" - but only when the interview subjects provide all of the material necessary to form a *complete* picture. But we don't learn anything of their opportunities, investment, or effort, and it's highly presumptuous for these men's lives to be described as "lonely", when there's no such evidence presented e.g. Their back stories. And where it might be easy to dismiss these men as paranoid survivalists or luxury condo-hawking opportunist developers, living underground (or "earth-sheltered") is in fact a very reasonable and particularly energy-efficient thing to do - especially if you can get it prebuilt for a small fraction of the tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars the government originally put into it. Take the case of "Ed of Subterra" - he comes across as a hippy-dippy, peace-love-and-understanding kind of guy who's made his former-missile-silo "castle" as homey as any cabin out in the woods of Oregon, so why not actually tell us about him and the people in the photos? Instead, we're left with "presented without comment" and more questions than answers. I'll be waiting for the director's cut with an extra half hour of *meaningful* interviews with the subjects so we can learn what they're really about, because, based on the descriptions (as I haven't seen them) of Perlin's previous two efforts, I think she's capable of dealing with complex historical material like a grownup.
