Q: Into the Storm

Q: Into The Storm may make you shake your head for six hours, but it’ll also give you a better understanding of the QAnon phenomenon and just how so many people could buy into theories that seem to not make a lot of sense.

With the personable Hoback as its guide, it offers real-time access to Ron, Jim, Fredrick, Qtubers, OAN’s Jack Posobiec, and more, and is bolstered by an avalanche of news and internet clips, archival material, and interviews with experts.

It's diverting in an Agatha Christie sort of way, but ultimately beside the point. Whoever Q is, he clearly didn't really have access to secret White House dope. And as the Trump administration fades further into the background, so does the importance of Q's identity. Paranoia may strike deep, but then it moves on.

If you’re thinking that six hours of conspiracy theories about basements of pizza joints filled with dead children might be a bit much, Hoback’s work is smarter than that. He really digs into the people around the Q phenomenon, focusing a lot of time on the 8chan admins. ... Some early episodes zip past these events a bit too easily, although later ones take the emergence of violence from the QAnon world more seriously.

Hoback approaches his series as part educational exploration and part investigation, and what emerges is a somewhat organized wreck. "Q: Into the Storm" soaks us in a deluge of information very quickly in the first two episodes before slowing down to entertain the veracity of several larger theories about Q's identity. ... But "Q: Into the Storm" doesn't neglect to connect a movement they insist is heroic at best and harmless at worst with a surge in racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic violence and a rekindled rise in neo-Nazism.

Q: Into the Storm bears a resemblance to an earlier HBO docuseries, "The Jinx," unfolding like a mystery, as the filmmaker plays mental chess with his subjects. What gives this six-part effort particular heft is the role QAnon has come to play in US politics, becoming, as director Cullen Hoback puts it, "part interactive game, part religion, part political movement."

Hoback's biggest misses are often when he tries to be the most ambitious. But there's so much going on that it's easy to admire the director-cinematographer-star's audacity, and to accept that a cleaner version of this story wouldn't have been as apt, or as interesting.

While Brennan and the Watkinses embody so much about the phenomenon, and while any one of them could be Q, some of the midseries episodes tracking them feel wasteful. At times, Hoback approaches good questions and then backs off, returning to the three men he’s decided to focus on.

“Into the Storm” could have used more essayistic touches, some more cultural history and big-picture perspective to go with its lengthy investigation. That said, it creates its own kind of rabbit hole, a sufficiently dark place to get lost in this mixed-up world.

It is most successful in its early going at thoughtlessly disseminating the Q message, and by its end has become a muddle with genuine bits of intriguing reporting studded amid so much dross.

The overall style is part Adam McKay (who, incidentally, produced the series), part winking Daily Show segment, part Crazy Frog music video. ... Hoback asserts that QAnon is a role-playing game that’s somehow managed to bleed into reality, with all the awestruck marvel of a man who hasn’t personally suffered its consequences. After watching the series, you might conclude that it would be more meaningful, and more productive, to hear from someone who has.