Originally published May 2016

I happened to watch Print the Legend immediately after I finished watching Killing Them Safely. I recall my thought process being along the lines of: "Ok, I just watched a two-hour documentary about big business destroying people's lives and eliminating the hope of any good intentions making its way to corporate success. I should watch something more uplifting and positive. I'll watch this documentary about 3D printing and how new technology is revolutionizing humanity in cool new ways."

Little did I know that it was about as disheartening as the previous movie.

Pros

• Not overly biased

• Provides an interesting case study about human psychology and other subject matters outside its own

• Provides a very wide viewpoint on its subject and the various methods and strategies the creators employed.

Cons

• Moments where the movie drags are when they're focusing too much on the emotions of people at the moment

• Not quite as much detail around the science of 3D printing as I would have liked

• Lack of focus on the technology actually makes the movie more about the people than anything else - entertainment vs education

Plot & Thoughts

I like this documentary despite coming away feeling like I know almost as little about 3D printing as I did when I started watching the movie. That should basically tell you that I don't think it does a very good job at the documentary part of things. It's an entertaining movie that is trying to tell the story of startup companies more than it's trying to educate you on the technology involved, which was kind of the thing I wanted to learn about. So in that regard, the movie fails.

However, I still like the movie partially because of the observational science you can apply to the people who are involved. More than anything else, Print the Legend is interesting because you can observe the people involved in the companies and their technology as it grows and stumbles. The movie is less about the technology and more about the psychology of the people making the tech. Since Print the Legend follows several companies and the individuals involved, there's a fair amount of analyzing to be done.

I was intrigued by how a startup company that consists of 3-5 people and a single product idea could blow up and become filled with several hundred people overnight. I was also deeply entertained by how that affects the business of the company and the thought process of the people involved who now have to consider it as a business instead of this cool idea that they want to patent and sell.

The most interesting thing in the movie to me was the story of Bre from Makerbot. Makerbot started out as a project for 3 smart guys who wanted to make a simple desktop 3D printer. I remember seeing their product featured on some tech websites I'd frequent back in 2009 and 2010, so I had a very small connection to their story in that I remember seeing their faces and product. Of the 3 guys, Bre was the more outgoing and publicly presentable. He had a friendly face and a friendly personality. Thus, they all decided that he would best serve the company as the public-facing marketing brand type/ Steve Jobs individual. It worked out well for them and, due to his public presence, Makerbot got a lot of attention. Soon the company started to grow very quickly.

Then at some point, the tone of their business takes a turn. Makerbot suddenly goes from a passionate workplace filled with unique and passionate people who are enjoying their work to a somewhat unfriendly corporate environment. It's not a sudden change either, it's a gradual one, which is what makes the change so interesting. As though Bre had become one with his own business, his statements and personality started to coincide with it as well. I was fascinated by how this passionate startup company, which had the hopes of being a friendly open-source piece of technology that could better humanity a little bit at the time, had managed to achieve success and slowly become a closed-source business that was more concerned with moneymaking. Just as much, I was fascinated by how Bre's goals and personality transformed alongside it.

Of course, this is only based on how the documentary presents the information, which could be very skewed, but it's still a believable scenario. We all like to think that given the same opportunity, we wouldn't let power and success change who we are or corrupt our goals and values, but when you're in it and it's a part of your life on such a regular basis, you may not even realize it's happening. I'm not sure if the makers of Print the Legend intended to make their documentary more of a study of psychology or the lifespan of a startup company, but that's really what their documentary ended up being about and it was the thing that kept me interested.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Print the Legend is entertaining as a movie to watch because of the human psychology and drama at play when companies and people with good intentions can end up morphing into the very thing they were originally against. It's fascinating to watch how the corporate mentality can completely change people and their ideas. However, Print the Legend is not an educational documentary and fails to go through much of the scientific details about the technology. If you want a movie about humanity and our collective psychology, this works fine, but if you're looking to learn more about 3D printing, the technology, or much of the business behind it, you won't find much here.