A film lasting almost three hours - throughout which I was unable to make out what the author [Mr Adam Curtis, as I then found out] wanted to say, except perhaps that he knew and/or cared nothing about history prior to his adolescence. It begins with the idea that plutocracy was more or less invented in 1975 New York, and it gets no better: apparently, doublethink in the USSR only developed in the 1980s and so on. At times it almost looked as if the film-maker believed that mankind waited for him to be born before politicians began to lie, media began to distort facts for propagandist purposes et cetera. Towards the end I actually began to wonder whether I wasn't watching something put together by a talented 13-year-old, still only discovering the basics of how this world turns round.
There are some faint hints the film was meant to say that politicians find the real world too complex and create a simplified picture of it. But then if that was true, surely the author wouldn't do the very same thing by presenting a world which is all about the US, the Arab countries* and Russia, and competely ignoring China?
* But not Afghanistan, which is ignored as well, it seems that after the 9/11 Americans went straight after Saddam Hussein without being bothered with Osama bin Laden.
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