HyperNormalisation (2016) Reviews

• We're not the good guys

  5Dog2016-10-27

  HyperNormalisation is both fascinating and hard to watch. Its format is more like a postmodern art film: there's a stream of archive news interspersed with interviews and close-up footage and repeated frames. It features disturbingly violent scenes. There's a voice-over and sometimes on-screen text. It's busy and frantic, and it keeps coming at you like a battering ram. It's also very long - and yet it's also very easy to watch. It draws you in and keeps you there, horrified but hypnotized. It's strange to think a documentary about deeply contentious political issues could be so compelling, and yet Curtis pulls it off. This film alone can't explain the Middle East situation or life under the corporate thumb, but it provides enough detail and curiosity to make you want to verify the details for yourself - and that's exactly as it should be. It pulls no punches naming and shaming a politicians, bankers, advertisers, strategists and war mongers on all sides. Curtis' aim is to unpick our culture of 'hypernormalisation' - in which nothing seems real anymore, because it isn't (it's carefully orchestrated or controlled, even when it appears to be chaotic). It's an anti-propaganda film, similar in approach to Noam Chomsky or even Michael Moore, and it burrows to the heart of everything that makes our society seem at times so sick and hopeless. It's brutal, but in the most useful way.

• A summary of where we are and how we got here.

  philw-122016-10-19

  I don't often write reviews on IMDb. In fact, this is only the second one I can remember doing. So why am I writing one now? Because this documentary is brilliant? No. It's very good, but brilliant would be a stretch. I am writing it, because this documentary is important. This film is long, at 2 hours 45 mins. For a documentary, you would think you'd fall asleep long before the end. Trust me, you won't. It is never boring, and at times, it's frankly mesmerising. In a nutshell the film tells how we have arrived in the post-truth political world, from it's origins in the 1975. It explains the complex interplay between politics, the rise of the internet, the media and social media. Using archive footage and the power of hindsight, it show's how our governments are now just controllers and managers of risk, rather than visionaries, and why you can no longer believe much of anything they tell you. Sounds like a conspiracy theory right? It isn't. I pride myself on being a rational thinker. I studied science at uni. I'm not religious and I take pleasure in debunking the ridiculous conspiracy theories you see on the internet. This is different. Not because he backs everything up with sources and evidence, but because if you are old enough, you will remember the events, and you will know it makes sense. I gave this 8/10. Would have been 7, but I think the importance of the subject matter warrants a bonus point. It could have scored a ten, but as I said, I'm a trained scientist, and I value evidence. The film is let down by the absence of enough hard proof. It left me with the feeling that it's absolutely spot on, and that I already knew what it is telling me, but just hadn't admitted it to myself. However, I feel that it will leave many, especially those of the more conservative persuasion, saying "where's the evidence?" Some more hard facts; documents, interviews with insiders, anything, would have helped to convincingly drive the point home. That said, if you're looking for something that will make you think, you'll certainly get that.

• A review without analysis

  Gretchen_X2017-04-30

  This is a very long film so I recommend breaking it up into two or more chunks and leaving some time for digestion in between. It has lots of interesting ideas and I guarantee even the best-read will learn something and have a couple of "Hmmmm" moments, if not an "Aha!" one. Curtis has a way of imposing a narrative upon your active perception using images, music and sounds in ways you would expect from, ahem, a film maker. He even casts himself as a journalist, rather than a storyteller. As a result, you are always aware that you are being manipulated, just like the manufactured reality discussed/presented in the film. You are the audience of the audience. Proceeding in this spirit, though many people have found Hypernormalisation depressing and frightening, it should not take you anywhere you haven't been before (if you are over 50 anyway). Barbarism in the pursuit of power is not peculiar to the 20th and 21st centuries, it is just a lot bigger and it's online. Hypernormalisation is not for the squeamish, but when you become aware that you have developed a level of immunity to these myriad images of horror, you get to understand what normalisation means. Neither is it for the faint hearted; the target audience may be those who are already deeply cynical. But Curtis is a clever film maker, let him entertain you.

• Flawed but fascinating in its polemic presentation

  bob the moo2017-02-21

  At the core of this film is a message which I think we can all appreciate; that the world is complex and filled with diversity but at the same time we are encouraged by our media, hobbies, and politicians, to believe it is much more black/white, and not to expose ourselves to views that contrast with our own. This is not new unfortunately – the politics of the right/wrong is everywhere, and the echo chambers of Twitter, CNN, Fox, and many other "people who liked this also liked these" type tools – it is pretty clear where we are. How we got here is more interesting, and there are worse ways to explore it than to allow Adam Curtis to have a run at explaining it. The way he does it here is as compelling and confusing and frustrating and flawed as one would imagine; it really succeeds in making some of his other work look like the tightest factual presentation ever. In almost three hours we explore the story by touching on Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, the internet, politics, Donald Trump, 1970's Russian sci-fi; the Arab spring; perception management, drugs, Brexit, UFO conspiracies, Twitter, and so on. Often the links are tenuous, but Curtis structures it really cleverly – we are given chunks of facts in a presentation that makes sense, and as a result we accept the links even as they jump countries and decades. The downside is that many will be turned off because this is polemic incorrectly presented as a documentary. It is not the latter but as the former it works very well. Although it runs to almost 3 hours, I did not find it boring, but rather found it quite compelling in its message and the manner in which it is presented. The strength of the film to me was not that it convinces in every word, or that I agreed with it wholly but rather that it gave me plenty to think about. It helps that I am old enough to remember many of these events – to have seen the shifting political allegiances, to experience the moments, and to feel like they were not organic in all cases. HyperNormalization is a niche film – it did not even make it not a BBC channel but rather was put on the streaming service directly. It is not as smart as it wants to, but it is engaging and interesting whether you agree with all of its assertions or not.

• Mis-interpretation of the past w/ blatant propaganda

  birthdaysuit112016-10-23

  It is a mis-interpretation of the past, if not outright status-quo propaganda. The documentary has these enormous suppositions that come from.. out of someone's ass perhaps? Um, excuse me, I grew up in the eighties and nineties, and to put a blanket statement over the entire western culture that everyone gave up hope of better things in the nineties is utter farcical bull crap. Really? The stock market was booming, (due to interest rate manipulation by the fed) the internet and bio-pharma boom was happening, and this film states that "everyone gave up ideas of a better future???" It then plays some movie clips over and over again and subsequently shows 9/11 footage as supposed obvious conclusion to fear and foreboding in America (and it seems the west in general) and the terror attacks were just a natural outcome from all of that? The movie even begins talking about NYC in the seventies running out of money and them waiting for the banks to come in and buy their bonds.. this had an inkling of interest for me, based on my understandings of the way the banks in America, especially after the forming of the federal reserve in 1913, behaved. They created, supported by Keynesian economists, the idea of the "business cycle." A complete sham that enormous amounts of westerner's and even the world in general, believe in. The business cycle is nothing more than the regular bailing out of the banks. Look no further than the GFC to confirm this. The Fed manipulates and lowers interest rates, the speculative markets and housing skyrocket, and then, low and behold, it all crashes! What to do? Punish the bankers that made shoddy investments? Throw any of them in jail? NO! Pay them gobs and gobs of taxpayer money. Sink the nation further into debt and provide more interest revenue streams to the banks, as they simultaneously proceed to do it all over again! Lower rates, the market soars, the bubbles inflate! Look at Deutsch Bank: 65 TRILLION in derivatives and there stock valuation of such a supposedly first class investing institution is less than TWITTER!! The derivatives they sit on top of equal 19 times the GDP of the most powerful market share of the EU: Germany!! Think of the massive jenga stack/bubble that is. Amazing.. here we go again, its not a matter of IF but WHEN this thing is going to blow. What this FILM really misses is the financial ties to everything. Money runs the world and the FED with its criminal monopoly of the US dollar is on of the kings. This massive crash in 2008 happens, we QE and lower rates and... no hyper inflation! How come? Man, if it was just printing money and lowering rates, all of the banana republics and African dictatorships would be the most powerful and wealthy nations in the world! How do we do it? Well this film alludes to it in the beginning: it had something to do with that massive war criminal, Henry Kissinger. This is the man who colluded with McNamara and Nixon to bomb Cambodia back to the stone age and created a power vacuum there that led to the genocide and slaughter of 2million people. Nice bit that was huh? Pol Pot running around and having his henchmen photograph and then systematically torture and murder most of the population. Forgot to mention that little feather in Kissinger's cap. But Kissinger also did some other things that are allowing us to export our inflation today to the rest of the world. He created the Petro-dollar cycle. You see, Nixon was at war in Vietnam, things were going well, slaughter was happening, the military industrial complex was making fat green. But there was a limit to it all: the pesky gold standard. You were limited by how much you could budget for war efforts by the amount of gold you had to back your dollars with, a nice check, a discipline for not over-spending. What to do? Well, you blame the international speculators, say you are saving the dollar from the gold hoarders around the world, and well.. cut the dollar loose from the gold standard. At the same time, what the film and Adam Curtis conveniently did not mention about Kissinger's dealings in the Middle East, he convinced the Saudi's and their oil producing friends of a protection racket. We would back them militarily in the Middle East if they would agree to only sell oil for US dollars. Yep, it was that simple. These two things kicked off the petro-dollar cycle: it goes like this: the fed creates dollars out of thin air, then the US government and the commercial banks borrow those dollars (at interest, of course) and then we, and the rest of the world, buy our oil from the middle east. Then Saudi Arabia and its pals take their profits and put them back into the Federal Reserve (specifically the New York branch). Then... get this brilliance... the Fed takes those dollars and loans them out again.. at interest! Phenomenal! A double loan occurs for money created out of thin air! I've written a book so far, so I will stop there, but research this yourselves folks.. don't believe the crap from this piece of crap from the msm. In conclusion, it is over-simplified garbage that paints a one-sided, dangerous picture. Do not BELIEVE my words, research instead of believing a neatly pieced but through out and through out fictional story with a biased geopolitical agenda. Where's the talk about Wikileaks, Clinton getting funds from Qatar,which has openly supported ISIS, the Qatar-Turkey Pipeline vs. Syria-Iran-Iraq Pipeline. These things were not mentioned because it is a propaganda piece, nothing more and just in time for the election.THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS IN GEO-POLITICS, remember that.