This rote and over-stuffed approach is made all the more frustrating by the fact that Kantayya has, in fact, succeeded at balancing the micro and macro of the digital world before. The creators are introduced, before the film switches to journalistic talking heads who contextualize the tech landscape some of the creators are then afforded a middle section, where their personal issues come to the fore before the journalists return finally, the creators appear once final time to wind up stories that the film never fully began telling in the first place. Each creator on which it focuses has an interesting story to tell, some of which even intersect with the broader narrative about censorship in the digital age, but it features so many personal threads, in so little time, that each one ends up slotted across the film in mechanical fashion. The result is less a coherent tapestry of an evolving digital world, and more akin to TikTok’s own algorithmic “For You” page - though not in any way that feels intentional or mirrors the experience of using the app - cycling through truncated snippets, each carefully curated towards anyone with a vague interest in the subject, though it rarely explores any one concept long enough for it to matter.Īn enormous part of the problem is that “TikTok, Boom.” feels entirely undiscerning in its selection of personal tales.
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It frequently finds itself torn between personal stories and a chilling bigger picture, in a way that struggles to blend and reconcile them. However, Shalini Kantayya’s 90-minute documentary fails to live up to the tongue-in-cheek grandeur of this punchy introduction. It is, at once, a reminder of a familiar cinematic image - the opening of the 1982 film “Blade Runner,” which explores the intersection of humanity and technology - and a promise of an up-close, intimate look at the omnipresent details of digital media, which you may or may not have noticed. The opening frames of “TikTok, Boom.” feature an extreme closeup of a ring-light reflected in a content creator’s eye.
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