A beautifully made film that could have been one of the best documentaries about mushrooms (and nature in general) but didn't. As a result, the film turned into one big and beautiful advertising.
As many English-speaking viewers have noted, the start is good/interesting, but only the beginning. Even before it gets to the middle, the film begins to talk about very specific things related to the use of mushrooms. The problem here is that I personally expected the film to explain the importance of mushrooms (and mold) rather than how people could use them. Yes, at the beginning of the film, the viewer is told about the importance of mold in the cycle of life in nature, i.e. in the decomposition of biological materials, but this function of Fungi is presented rather superficially. The second point is that trees are interacting with each other using Fungi. That was all that was important in the first half of the film. In the second half, only interesting was the story of how mold can destroy an entire settlement of ants, how it acts like a virus. That was really interesting, especially considering the use of very high-quality computer graphics. But that's all you can find in the movie.
What is the rest of the movie like that? A long and pathetic discussion about the importance of Fungi, about the role of mushrooms in the life of civilization (not in terms of food, but in terms of religious beliefs). In general, the rest of the film resembles the New Age movement, because here you have long stories about the use of mushrooms in religious practices and various groups of fungi fans, and aphoristic remarks about almost worshiping mushrooms and their essence. I was particularly impressed by the fact that almost the entire film in the frame appeared some entrepreneur who is engaged in the cultivation of various mushrooms. But I never understood why he was doing it, because his range is very large. If he grew them as food, the range would be noticeable already and reduced to 2-3 options. But he has a huge number of them, but not in terms of the amount needed to start a business selling mushrooms as food. However, this is not the main drawback of the whole film, but the fact that this entrepreneur is not a scientist or even a journalist talking about Fungi. This man is just a big fan of mushrooms, as well as a businessman. And I think the second one is the dominant one. I write so much about this man for the reason that almost half of the film we will see him and hear his profound sayings about the importance of mushrooms. Yes, there are scientists in the film as well, but the film, for some unknown reason, mercilessly edited their interviews, reducing them to a minimum. But it would be interesting to listen to them, and not waste your time watching the big advertising of this businessman and his enterprise.
My second claim is to pay too much attention to mind-altering mushrooms (in the spirit of Pelevin’s Generation P). Here we have cancer patients who use them to reduce the psychological stress associated with a deadly disease and simply consumption as an extension of consciousness. Why it was necessary to spend so much time on such a specific and ambiguous topic is also a mystery to me, because it is kind of a popular science documentary about the place of Fungi in nature. This can also include the continuation of this conversation, but in the context of using mushrooms as a medicine. And this is where the film enters the very tenuous ground of science, or rather pseudoscience. There are a lot of controversial statements in the film, which greatly reduce the credibility of the film as a whole. For example, at the rare moment when a voiceover sounds in the film, we are told that man (the human brain) acquired its modern functions precisely because of those hallucinatory mushrooms that our ancestor collected in the desert and which grew on the dung of either a camel, or an elephant, or some other animal. It is because of them that man speaks and speaks. It is quite controversial to claim that the consumption (eating) of mushrooms had such a radical impact on the development (evolution) of the human brain of the first people.
The second moot point in the film is the entrepreneur’s claim that consuming some special mushrooms cured his 89-year-old mother of breast cancer. I do not dispute that mushrooms can be used in medicine, but such high-profile statements need stronger, more numerous and scientifically based facts. I’ve heard that scientists have found a cure or a cure for one particular type of cancer, breast cancer, but these were just the first intermediate results that FRANCE 24 did, but I haven’t heard of the final result. And this method (medication) is definitely not related to mushrooms. My point is that the film uses a dangerous tactic of sensationalism. And in general, the film paints Fungi as a cure for almost all diseases. Given that this is not voiced by a doctor or a scientist, the film loses much in terms of credibility.
And the last thing I'd like to point out, which is particularly evident towards the end of the film. It’s a pattern where someone in a movie utters a short, bombastic phrase, after which we are shown either happy faces or panoramic views (natural) landscapes. Phrases such as “Fungi is a window into the world of the mysteries of the universe and who understands them, understands the structure of the whole world...” or “Fungi are the foundation of our entire world, and we have much to learn from them...” And all this to the accompaniment of majestic music and video, as I said above, with beautiful natural landscapes (beautiful waterfalls, panoramas of endless forests, etc.). It is beautiful, no doubt, but it does not bring any information to the viewer. It's like eye gum. Yes, there are videos or various mushrooms artificially created on a computer (as they sprout from the ground or from a tree trunk). At first it pleases the eye, for it is done beautifully. The only problem is that they are so often used, that is, they are so often included in the film that in the end they become sick of their essential monotony. If they were used as an illustration to offer a truly valuable and scientifically based view of the nature of mushrooms, then this went nowhere, but here they were used simply to fill in the visual range.