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Boyd Williamson, writing at PopMatters, thinks Michael Apted’s Up documentaries “have lost their spine when confronting the class issues.”

Seven Up! was first created as a one-off documentary for World in Action, a current affairs program on British television. It was conceived as a sociological investigation into how Britain’s class system is maintained. The narrator introduces [fourteen seven-year old British] children by declaring that the “shop steward [a rank-and-file union representative] and the executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.” In the first three installments, the children are asked about their plans for their future, their feelings on private versus public education, which political party they favor, and their thoughts on labor unions.

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This critical focus on class has become less and less pronounced with every installment since 21 Up. Apted attributes this shift to a revelation he had after showing the movie in the United States. In his director’s commentary for 42 Up, Apted says that he was initially fearful that the series, with its uniquely British vocabulary of class, wouldn’t translate to an international audience. However, after he saw the positive reaction 21 Up received within the US, Apted had his American epiphany: He was not making a “political document,” as he had originally thought, but instead, a “humanistic film”.

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The project’s built-in limitations aside, it’s questionable whether Apted, who has also directed films such as The World Is Not Enough, a James Bond movie, and the Jodie Foster vehicle Nell, was ever completely interested in the series’ foundational concern—class.

You can read the rest of the article at PopMatters. You can read more about the Up series of documentaries in this Wikipedia article. And you can view a QuickTime version of the trailer for the most recent film in the series, 49 UP here.