Released: 1st January
Seen: 5th January
Bryan Johnson is a weird man, that’s the story you’ll find if you google him. A tech millionaire who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of immortality through a strict regimen that includes 100 pills, multiple high-end medical devices and plasma transfusions from his son. It’s an undeniably odd story on some level, there have been people obsessed over their health since the first vegan told everyone else how much they loved being vegan but Bryan Johnson is on his own unique level. Bryan truly seems to believe that the insane hard work that he’s doing will actually keep him from dying and the documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever gives you a glimpse into his lifestyle… I might choose death over this option but to each their own.
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever is a (allegedly) deep intense look at the regimen Bryan Johnson is currently going through as part of his journey towards immortality, or at least to slow the process down and add a few extra years to his life span. It shows everything from the insane diet and pills to the medical tests he regularly does to see what his aging rate is and even touches upon the wild story I mentioned earlier about the transfusions of blood from his son. Along the way the documentary certainly makes an attempt to interrogate the effectiveness of some of these, even having people outright say it won’t work, but throughout it all the bulk of the story is about Bryce’s connection to his son and how that is part of why he wants to make this incredibly difficult journey.
As a person, I have to admit that I do not understand Bryan’s choices in life. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever presents him as a somewhat lonely man who has regimented his life so much that it’s caused him to drive away a lot of people, made it impossible for him to create lasting relationships with anyone who isn’t his own son or on his payroll and made him spend most of his time trying to buy more time that he can use to do basically nothing. The way his life is presented feels exhausting, there is little joy shown here and when it is shown it almost feels like the documentary is throwing it out going “We swear this is a human being and not a robot”… but this review should not be about him as a person, I’m sure that Bryan would look at my life and find it to be wasted (he’d probably be more accurate than I would be in my assessment, but he has hundreds of millions of dollars and it’d be awfully mean of him to punch down like that). The problem is that in order to review the documentary one has to review how it presents Bryan as a person and the image it presents is not the best.
The big issue that Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever has is that it feels like it asks questions without trying to answer them or even going into as much detail as it could. It certainly tries to present an even case, on one hand we have Bryan advocating for what he’s doing as a net positive but then we have scientists going “Well actually, what he’s doing is not even close to a scientific study” and chooses not to delve into it that much. We might touch upon things like his divorce but instead of maybe looking into that topic in any depth, we just get a brief description of her side (his ex-wife is not interviewed) and then him saying it’s all lies and we just move on… questions raised, not answered.
This kind of keeps happening with the idea that maybe this is something of a grift or even the blood transfusion thing. The blood transfusion is probably the part about Bryan’s journey you know because it’s the thing that undoubtedly made this documentary something worth even doing because the story of the tech millionaire living on his son’s blood caught attention. The film touches upon it, even shows that Bryan is donating plasma to his own father as part of this medical journey… you know what it never shows? The plasma transfusion had no effect. There were reports made by Bryan that it made no impact over what he was already doing so he stopped, that might be some great information to share but the film doesn’t do it. It’s not making a complete picture.
What Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever feels like it’s doing is PR for Bryan Johnson, trying as hard as it can to make him seem less weird to the world. Everything about Bryan’s life seems boring and bland but we have a montage right at the end of him rock climbing and bowling so he must be having fun. The relationship with his son seemed weird to anyone who heard the story about him, so the film does the best it can to make them look normal because nothing says normal like shirtless father-son workouts and a son asking his father ‘can i take my pills now’ after the dad takes a selfie of them both shirtless eating whatever the hell they eat in the morning. Bryan has well known relationship problems (his Wikipedia page is fascinating) but the film makes it a quirky thing that he knows, it’s not bad that he left his wife after she got cancer or anything like that, it’s all normal. As a documentary it felt like the film maker was trying to force us to like this guy, or maybe Bryan was trying to fake likability that he doesn’t actually have, either way it felt forced and wrong.
There is one thing that Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever does do perfectly though and that’s make it clear as possible that what Bryan is doing isn’t remotely doable by the average person. Bryan is a fortunate man, he has so much money that he can afford to take trips around the world to do gene therapy or spend god knows how much to have a pharmacy full of supplements in his own home and a team of doctors who do pointless MRI’s on him any time he wants and the film at least recognises that… sure, it’d be great if the film recognised that the real thing that’s helping Bryan is that he has the time and resources to do all this and most people are lucky to have the time to stop in the drive through to grab a burger on the way to work but hey, at least it gets that Bryan is lucky.
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever is an OK documentary about a guy who is wasting his life in the way that he has chosen to do and good on him for making that choice. It’s a documentary that hints at harder ideas but doesn’t explore them, but at least it tries to show a few of the less glamorous sides to this choice Bryan has made. It certainly doesn’t make living forever sound appealing, if anything it makes a good case for people getting some mental health treatment and a full overthrow of the capitalist system that forces most of us to grind while a few people get to jet off to a weird island where they get their genes fucked up Jurassic Park style. It’s a film that clearly wanted to make you feel differently about the man who took plasma from his son to try and live longer and I guess it did that… in that I feel sorry that this man chose to spend his life following this extremely insane health regimen instead of just living his goddamn life.
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