So this is a documentary by Keanu Reeves about the shift to digital film-making, and it is absolutely fascinating. It kind of traces the evolution of digital technology, and how things introducing even one digital step — digital editing, say — makes it that much more inevitable that the whole production chain eventually becomes digital.

And it explores that whole shift by talking to industry people, and big name directors (Soderbergh, Rodriguez, Lucas, Scorsese, Cameron), and the cinematographers (who are very threatened by the move to digital) and the people who do digital color timing. And you’ve got people like George Lucas who are unabashed pro-digital evangelists; you’ve got some hardline film people; you’ve got a lot of really pragmatic people who see the promise but also the flaws; you’ve got industry people bragging about their products and then people giving their war stories about actually using them, in a surprisingly and refreshingly candid way.

There are about three dozen different fascinating things, from the absurdity of legacy physical processes, to the rapidity with which digital stuff has improved, to the ridiculous primitiveness that was behind the Star Wars prequels (those were seriously SHOT in like first-gen 1080p cameras!), to how digital changes the way people think about making movies (and Lena Dunham was really interesting, in that she’s sort of a filmmaker who has never known a legacy world, and in her own words probably wouldn’t even be a filmmaker if it weren’t for digital).

This is one of the better-made documentaries I’ve seen, giving a much more nuanced and candid view of things than you see in your typical exposé-style activist documentary. If you have any interest at all in the subject, it’s worth watching. Highly recommended.

(Ironic/apropos footnote is that I watched the thing in Netflix streamed to my tablet. So, yeah, that digital stuff may end up changing the movie-watching experience…)