Sundance 2022: TikTok, Boom Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

On its surface, it can be easy to dismiss a documentary centered around the app TikTok. Many people claim to understand its power, going so far as to make jokes about some of its previous business practices surrounding privacy and user rights, however, there is a much deeper story to this specific app’s worldwide success and meteoric rise to becoming a direct threat to Facebook.

As a whole, TikTok Boom does its best to approach this very complex and constantly evolving app from a digestible and simplistic manner by choosing to trace the timeline of its original creation, Doyin, as it exists in China, the rapid success of its modified global version, TikTok, as well as some of the lives of several of the app’s most successful creators and influencers. Their stories are mixed within members of the tech industry who speak directly about how the app is able to identify and tailor specific videos and topics based on user preferences it learns in a matter of hours, thus being able to cut through any static of questions or concerns due to its ability to capture user’s interests almost immediately.

But over the course of the film, it becomes very plain to observe that there is nothing extraordinary about its narrative path in order to tell its stories. Furthermore, its decision to be formulaic in this regard almost discounts the film’s greatest strength and most interesting attribute with the app’s infamous algorithm. TikTok boasts a technology that not only delivers a bespoke feed of videos and bite-sized content designed to allow the user to get lost in the art of scrolling, but more importantly, its true success is through its ability to acquire mass amounts of user data that is masked as a necessity for creating such a unique app experience but in reality, could just as easily be perceived as something far more sinister. TikTok Boom addresses this issue head-on even going so far as to paint a potential image of a technological Cold War behind the scenes, however, it then quickly reverts back to a more comfortable setting with its users and their success.

In the end, the film delivers an insightful portrayal of an app’s rise to global fame and the users who helped it reach this arena. However its emphasis on the app’s data collection policies is where its true moments of intrigue lie as their practices are a poorly kept secret often becoming jokes within its user base. While singularly disturbing, it is compounded by a mix of the user’s acceptance of this reality alongside a stark image for privacy, and the lack thereof, for the future.

TikTok Boom does follow a commonplace delivery method of its information, but despite this, it offers insightful stories of success accompanied by a message of concern for what lies ahead.

*still courtesy of Sundance

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