There have been a few tech documentaries in the last couple of years (We Steal Secrets, The Internet’s Own Boy, Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine [Review forthcoming]) and the common thread in all of them is that they desperately try to make the proceedings suspenseful, but the subject matter just isn’t that compelling. Deep Web gets around that by making it kind of a crime caper – “kingpin builds The Silk Road, a shadowy eBay-like site for buying and selling drugs” – but because the filmmakers are coming from a sympathetic point-of-view regarding the facilitator of the site, it has all the same troubles of the documentaries that came before it. It’s one thing humanizing the subject, but this documentary went out of its way to celebrate and advocate for Ross Ulbricht, the purveyor of the Silk Road – making him sound like a trailblazer in the Wild West of the Internet. This is despite outlining how Ulbricht laundered money and paid $730,000 to have five people killed (thankfully, there is no evidence a murder was ever carried out). Hey, I’m all for documentaries taking unpopular positions (The Thin Blue Line and Paradise Lost challenged public narratives and literally saved lives), but at some point your inability to be objective makes your film become less Titicut Follies and more Loose Change.