First off, the one thing I will say about the museum in it's favor is that the architecture is stunning. Like it is possibly the coolest building I've ever seen in person. The exhibits look great too.

But I went for the first time today and found myself feeling an odd mix of overwhelmed and underwhelmed. There's a lot of material in there, it's hard to know where to start. When you do pick something to learn about you're kinda stuck there for several minutes at a time to complete the video or display. When I go to museums I kinda take a quick glance at the stuff that's uninteresting and linger on the stuff that is interesting and that was very hard to accomplish at this museum, nothing really stood out from the rest.

The museum, in my opinion, failed to completely capture the emotional elements of the fight for human rights. Highs and lows. Largely I feel the exhibits failed to capture a 'mood', atmosphere or even theme. Which is important when most of your exhibits are not physical objects that connect us and contextualize things.

Thirdly, the fact that there are very few artefacts is a real bummer. Again, museum looked great, but artefacts or more art installations would have elevated things imo.

I feel like most of the videos were also... not super well produced? Kind of bland. CBC quality. Also a lot of the videos were on autoplay with French dialogue AND captions, and I don't speak French so I felt kind of excluded from becoming interested. Also some of the interactive exhibits didn't really work that well.

Idk, I guess for being arguably the #1 attraction in the city I expected a little more. It wasn't terrible but it certainly wasn't great. Compared to the Manitoba Museum which may just be my favorite museum in Canada it was a snoozefest.

What's your take on the museum? Love it? Hate it? Have some valid criticisms? I'd love to hear your thoughts.