I observed Netflix documentary film “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever” with some conflicted feelings. Here is a man extremely dedicated to staying young and healthy as long as possible, and the documentary closely and fascinatingly examines his unorthodox lifestyle, but it also shows some understandable skepticism at times. To be frank with you, I rolled my eyes more than once during my viewing, but I will not deny that I was also fairly amused and entertained as reflecting more on my rather unhealthy lifestyle.

That figure in question is Bryan Johnson, whom many of you have probably heard about as his lifestyle came to draw a lot of media attention several years ago. He was once a very successful businessman who founded a prominent Internet company, but, after selling his company, he has dedicated a lot of himself to his little health experiment project, where he has tested a lot of things on his body for slowing down its aging process.

The documentary shows us how thoroughly Johnson has controlled nearly every aspect of his daily life. Besides an extensive morning exercise routine and many different kinds of vitamin and supplement pills, he firmly sticks to his rigorous diet and daily schedule, and it looks like his entire life revolves only around aging as little as possible. Watching him systemically going through one stuff and another, I could not help but think of how the hero of “American Psycho” (2000) starts another day with a lot of obsessive care on his extremely fit body.

At least, Johnson looks a lot healthier compared to how he looked in the past. When he was the young son of a Mormon couple, he looked rather chubby, and he still looked a little overweight around the time when he finally became a successful millionaire businessman around the 2010s. However, as he candidly admits in the documentary, he was not so happy as constantly letting himself get driven by more work, and that was one of the main reasons why his married life eventually got crumbled. 

 After getting quite motivated to get things under control, Johnson became interested in health and longevity, and that was the beginning of his little private project. As he kept going on and on with his new lifestyle, he found himself getting better and healthier than before, and that made him more obsessed with living long while being literally young in his body. He has delved more into the scientific researches on longevity, and he is surely determined to try everything including a questionable gene therapy just for pushing the limits a bit more.

Now many of you may roll your eyes as much as I did, and the documentary clearly recognizes the absurd aspects of its hero’s journey toward health and longevity. In addition to the understandably critical comments on him, several experts sharply point out why Johnson’s project will likely amount to nothing in the end. After all, any reliable clinical experiment requires a lot of individuals from the start, and Johnson has only tried on himself, hasn’t he?

Furthermore, as promoting his project as well as his little health consulting company in public, Johnson virtually tries to sell his expensive lifestyle to many others out there, and he surely deserves all the criticism he has received as a result. After all, he could afford all those health stuffs because he is quite rich from the beginning, and that takes me back to an old classic Japanese TV animation series, where only rich people can live forever just because they can easily buy an option for immortality unlike many other poor people left out there to die sooner or later.

Meanwhile, director Chris Smith, who previously directed “Fyre” (2019), also tries to capture some human sides of his controversial subject. As living with one of his three children for a while, Johnson comes to have a precious opportunity for getting closer to his kid, who does not have much problem with his father’s odd lifestyle. Just like his father, he does not feel like belonging to their family’s religious background, and that certainly helps him bond more with his father.

When Johnson’s aging father later gets interested in his son’s ongoing project, Johnson has both his father and son join his another odd attempt on slowing down aging process further. I am sure that you will observe this with disbelief and skepticism like I did, but you may be also touched a bit by how these three different people come to make sort of connection among them in more than one aspect.

However, we are still not totally fine with Johnson, and neither is the documentary, even though it ends with a fairly uplifting moment as expected. Later in the documentary, we see him going to a little island near Honduras just for getting that aforementioned gene therapy without any legal trouble, and we naturally come to have more skepticism on his adamant belief on health and longevity.

In conclusion, “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever” could go deeper into its human subject, but it has some thought-provoking moments for us to muse on. As being over 40 at present, I certainly care a lot more about my health than before, but now I am reminded of Alan Parker’s underrated black comedy film “The Road to Wellville” (1994), which makes a naughty satiric fun on forced health. Sometimes, being *too* healthy is not exactly as good as we think, is it?