Documentary Review: The Thread
Rating: 3 and 1/2 Stars
I’m not a frequent viewer of documentaries. Documentaries such as “The Thread” occasionally make me ask myself why I don’t watch more of them. Sometimes documentaries can be just as entertaining as a fictitious feature film. Other documentaries can make you want to gouge your eyes out.
The Thread, is an effective documentary recounting real social media stories and perspectives from the Boston Marathon Bombings.
The movie begins with the most compelling character, in any other movie, you would see him as an actor. But in this documentary Kevin Cheetham is a juvenile-minded college student who just doesn’t have every screw tightly fitted.
He becomes the shining example of the film. He is representative of a member of the social media trap. He is our resident Reddit addict, and a victim of being enslaved to his Internet identity that provides him with nurturing and love, outside of the “Eat a dick and die” commentary provided by the other half of Reddit’s faithful.
The other highlight of the film is the stark contrast between two Reddit moderators.
One moderator hosted a page on live updates of the immediate aftermath of the bombing. False information did reach the network airwaves, but for the most part, a lot of picture and video content gave inside looks to the event immediately.
The second moderator hosted a page dedicated to discovering the identity of the Boston bombers by analyzing available web content. This led to a witch hunt that wrong accused a missing man as the possible suspect terrorist that bombed the marathon. We later find out the young man had committed suicide two weeks before the bombing happened. The rest of the commentary on that Reddit page was mindless theories and guesses concerning “who done it”. Authorities rather took care of business, naming and finding the two bombers. This Reddit page proved to be more inflammatory in creating unneeded controversy. The documentary well establishes this point, but shows how the moderator really had no bad intentions.
No one has bad intentions and is trying to release false information. It’s the nature of the Internet we discover. The Thread opens up many opportunities to ask questions and answer them on our morals and principles.
My only criticism is that The Thread does have moments where we revolve around a redundant topic or theme where we get anxious to move on to the next theme or topic. Overall though, The Thread is very well pieced together and edited to keep the pace up and the viewer engaged.
