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This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The acting in this movie is really good.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A true test of the impression that a film makes is whether I remember that I've seen it before. I watched "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" on Crackle last night. About half way through the film, I had a moment of deja vu and realized that I had watched this same film many years ago. Clearly, my sub conscience had tried to suppress the memory for some reason.The film is a documentary about four men, a lion tamer, a topiary sculptor, a mole rat biologist, and a robotics engineer. I tried very hard to find the common thread between these various professions. Was it that filmmaker was trying to demonstrate complexity through much simpler systems? Perhaps a look inside the mind of several eccentric geniuses and glimpse at how they arrive at solutions to organic problems? Or, is it just an entertaining look at four unique professions which would have been less intriguing as four short films? The editing style bounces from man to man, from profession to profession, and has many cutaways to segment clips from various "B" (or maybe "D") movies. The key phrase in the film, and in the story telling, is said by the robotics engineer when he describes a proposed exploration system as "fast, cheap, and out of control." After thinking about the movie and what message, if any, it was trying to convey, my conclusion is that the film itself it was is "fast, cheap, and out of control" and that any deeper meaning than that is overexertion on the viewers part in trying to find connections that do not exist.

Hiding within this movie are four fairly interesting mini-documentaries about four men, each with a vision - perhaps even an obsession - about one particular facet of life. The common thread uniting them is that each of the four is fascinated by the ways in which animals, men, plants, and even machines evolve, learn, and grow. A recurring theme is training or control.Unfortunately, these four interesting stories are chopped up and interwoven in ways that often seem arbitrary and pointless. Plus, about 25% of the movie is made up of clips from other, mostly bad, movies... and the soundtrack music is often intrusive and annoying. So I'm mystified why a number of critics thought this was the best documentary of 1997. Maybe there were just a lot of bad documentaries that year! Worth watching if you have nothing else to do, but nowhere near great.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, 1997 A documentary that aims high and doesn't quite make it. It's about four guys that have achieved great things in very unussual fields. The director was trying to make a point about what it takes to be a success. He tried to make the argument that although the mens fields were very different (robot designer, mole rat expert, lion tamer, gardener) they succeeded for the same reason. He did this by first introducing the men, than interviewing them, than having the answers of one play while he showed the other working. It was a pretty well made movie and shot pretty well, but it just didn't quite do it for me. It was a well made movie and I enjoyed it, but I feel that it could have done a lot more.6/10, 23rd best of 1997, 250th of the 90s, 627th overall.

In science, there is a property of any complex system, that more complexity and subtlety will result with each added component. This, in my opinion, was the subject of "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control." The parallels drawn between AI, societal mammals, commonality of life (the lion tamer) and art (topiary gardener) flesh out a world where the idea of "God" can well be reduced to a simple inherent property of existence. Mole rat societies are not so far from human societies; humans are not so different from animals; robots are not so different from animals; and each individual represents a unique degree of specialization that proves important to the greater society it exists in. I found this work elegant, subtle, and even-handed, not to mention completely unique in its structure and faith in the audience to decipher an individual meaning from the context provided. Each person interviewed is wholly engrossed in their craft, something for which no other human can be substituted, and that exuberance shines in their eyes. It's a strange ride that inspires wonder in trusting viewers, exactly the way that the experts' wonder has motivated their realization as truly unique humans.