The new documentary by Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, “Fantastic Machine,” takes its title from King Edward VII’s response to a six-minute movie of his coronation made by a pioneering filmmaker, Georges Méliès. The movie was filmed not at London with the actual players, but with actors on a stage set at Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis. Quoth the monarch after having seen the short, “What a fantastic machine the camera is.”

Yet the true gist of “Fantastic Machine” can be gleaned from the king’s follow-up comment: The camera “even found a way to record the parts of the ceremony that didn’t take place.” 

Was this the observation of a man dumbfounded by a new technology, or was it a sly aside about the medium’s inherent artificiality? The likelihood that it could have been both isn’t out of the question. Still, given the challenges technology has thrown our way in recent years, we’d be wise to to extend a measure of compassion to the perplexed king.

Messrs. Danielson and Van Aertryck ask the question: “What happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself and an untethered free market meet 45 billion cameras?” In doing so, they disclose a smidgen of bias, cluing us in to their skepticism about humankind (inherently narcissistic) and capitalism (inherently greedy). That isn’t to say Messrs. Danielson and Van Aertryck haven’t extended their due diligence in raising “the question of societal consequences” stemming from our being engulfed in a glut of filmed images.

Taking us back to the first photograph — that would be Joseph Nicephore’s 1826 bitumen print of his family’s country home at Le Gras, France — the filmmakers provide a brief overview of the medium and its offshoots in cinema and television. Maybe too brief: One can almost hear the directors huffing and puffing as they sprint their way past Daguerre, Muybridge, and the advent of the BBC to reach the 21st century. They’re eager to get to the present day, like, now.

Pity the filmmakers and their research team for having to cull through innumerable images, videos, and related materials in order to bring some clarity to our media landscape. Adult content is touched upon, primarily in the guise of Belle Delphine, a young South African woman whose online antics are only made more unseemly by the cartoonish morphing of her features. 

On other tangents, photo-journalists are outed as being exploiters of human misery, news anchors as being fussy about their coiffures, and young people, you know, they can be reckless. Cue the segment featuring a Russian model, Viktoria Odintcova, doing her Harold Lloyd impression on top of a Dubai skyscraper.

The beautiful are a species apart, youth is wasted on the young, and the camera lies as much as any other presumed source of objective information. So what else is new? In the end, “Fantastic Machine” falls victim to the exhaustion fomented by information overload. Messrs. Danielson and Van Aertryck don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. At this point, they trail behind the curve.

What they do accomplish, at rare moments, is to bring humanity and balance to the horrors, banalities, and absurdities of all the stuff on our screens. The joy a young man feels upon seeing the trailer for an upcoming “Star Wars” movie is as indelible as the archival footage of a denizen of Papua, New Guinea, seeing his visage for the first time. The lens can absorb kindness as well as prompt cruelty. There are truths disclosed in “Fantastic Machine” that are as cagey as the camera itself.