The premise of Imagine It!, a documentary by Rudy Poe and Richard Favener, is an excellent one: imagine what the world would be like if everyone imagined a better world, and then engaged in making it happen. The main point is to get younger people interested in engineering and problem-solving.
Unfortunately, the way in which the idea is presented in the film did not work for me.
Last Comic Standing winner Iliza Shlesinger is the host, but she is seriously underused: popping up from time to time haphazardly, and not nearly often enough. A lot of "talking heads" present a lot of interesting information, but the film too often just cuts from one to the other of them, without explanation or introduction.
There are a few graphics, but not enough. The film could definitely have used more images and less shots of the experts, even though those experts include astronaut Sally Ride, the co-founders of the Blue Man Group, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, among others.
I thought that part of the documentary was aimed at educators, and part of it was aimed at young people. It seems that all of it is supposed to be aimed at young people primarily, but the part that I thought was for educators would probably not interest the 11-to-15 year olds who were interviewed in the film, and the part that is obviously aimed at that age group is jarring with the more adult part.
Overall, this is a well-intentioned documentary that presents some important ideas, but it fell short for me by not using Shlesinger to better advantage, by not having more images to break up the train of "talking heads," and by not gearing itself to either a younger audience or an older one, thus not really engaging either one consistently.
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