Life in a Day 2020 review – ambitious, bizarre and hugely exasperating

Kevin Macdonald's film aims to give a snapshot of the modern world but its context-free clips look more like a corporate ad

Sensory overload and incoherence are sadly the dominant qualities of this idealistic crowdsourced YouTube video project from director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott, which is about everything and nothing.

It is a follow-up to Macdonald's Life in a Day movie from 2011, in which legions of people responded to a request to send in homemade videos on what they were doing on a certain day in 2010: a time-capsule snapshot mosaic from all over the world. This time he and Scott put out a worldwide call for people to record all the various sad, funny, passionate or banal things they were doing on 25 July 2020; he got 324,000 videos from 192 countries.