shoom013
This movie is great ! I saw good comments already left here about this film, but I just had to spill this out - even though I don't do it usually. It leaves you with enough space to freely follow delusions about things around you, without having problems with deliberately abstracted characters tied to a specific country or political order. Bitter satire, yet spiced with some subtle humour enough to overcome inevitable brutal scenes for unprepared sensitive stomachs. The essence of the story is scrupulously followed to the very end of the film, despite of uncovering an indication about all this being just some writer's imagination. Reading Huxley's "Brave New World", Orwell's "1984", or watching Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", or even a movie like "Matrix" moved me and gave me similar thrill, and left me thinking about that stuff and other things some while - just to give hint about this film, but not to compare with.
Ryu_Darkwood
This is a grim tale about how totalitarian regimes try to ban the free spirit out of the minds of their citizens. Performances by Ralph Fiennes, as the warden sympathetic to the cause, and Donald Sutherland, as the imprisoned rebel leader, are both splendid. I liked the satirical approach to the subject. Despite its harsh and eerie subject - the cycle of violence concerning revolutions and contra-revolutions - it is also very funny movie on a darker level. It's an absolute blast to spot the existing dictatorial regimes they mixed up to create the most horrible regime imaginable.Another great movie getting a mediocre score. It's a shame. Though I do understand that this is not the material for your average escapism of everyday life. This grim and violent tale is perhaps only interesting for those with an interest in modern history.
Kazetnik
Many others have commented on this "homage" to all satires of a political bent and its hodge-podge of referenced dictators, and I can only agree. Pol Pot, Hess, Mussolini, Caligula, Winston Smith, they're all here, filtered through a film school montage of techniques and borrowings. It's all very unsatisfactory, character motivations are opaque and inconsistent, and the tone is uneven, uncertain if it is satirical comedy or mockumentary expose.The ostensible message identified by other reviewers of the movie - that all resistance to tyrants by ordinary people is futile - is, however, less clear to me. Yhe very fragmented nature of the final ten minutes or so seems not to have been commented on either here or in professional reviews. To write it off as a descent into madness, as it has been, seems to ignore a certain poignancy and trickiness of the closing scene, where the daughter leaves her father in a flat on a council estate (looking like somewhere in South London), gets into the lift and weeps. Are we meant to conclude that everything that has gone before is the delusion of a madman, typing his story endlessly to the exclusion of the real? Or that the hypercoloured parody of the bulk of the film is a metaphor for the life that we Winstons live in apparent freedom but actual oppression? A block of flats, uniform, utilitarian, where people try and make a life for themselves lacks the drama of a North Korea or Cambodia, and the censorship and mental poverty may be invisible to us since we are not starving or sent to re-education camps or explicitly tortured. Maybe I am being too generous to this very flawed film, but the ending has left me with many questions than anything else in the movie, since it seems to require us to go back and look again at the rest of the movie. Are we so remote from this exaggerated, fictional country? Is it just a matter of degree?
NetflixZZZZ
OK, I admit to be the ignorant one who "grew up in a mushroom" (quote axon50). Never seen "1984", or other artwork that this film has been accused of "borrowing" from. But hey, what can I do? They were (still are) all banned where I grew up. Now I find myself extremely lucky to have come cross this underrated, poorly advertised film.For a person who has a good idea of, or lived under the "red terror", this hits right home. If you think the villains in LOTB are exaggerated, wait till you learn the real deeds of Chairman Mao, Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Khomeini, Joseph Stalin
Yes, the characters are simplified & the story is abstract, but how much can one fit in 1 hour of what he sees of the world political history + current conflicts? This is a drama, not a documentary. If a story can be told in a news report, it can also be told in a poem and this is that poem.The director's symbolic depiction of the "gray muddy world" is in high contrast blank & white, with a cynical, almost comical mood. Compared to other recent political thrillers like "Munich", "Syriana", "Savior"
this is high art. If those are Jazz or Classical, this is Rock n' Roll - and I'm a fan!
AD
