Can't Get You Out of My Head

This should be required viewing for any person planning to join an organisation or belief system of any kind which has a 'Grand Plan' to change the world. The last century should have taught everyone where those sort of cults always lead but here we are.

This is dense and at times feels all over the place, but it comes together and you'll have moments of sublime horror and comedy on the journey. It's cynical and dark at times but illuminating and powerful at the same time. Great soundtrack too!

The good: The individual stories, especially in the first part, are superbly interesting. Many other montage parts are informative, some are mesmerizing to look at and listen to, and the overall feel of the documentary series is almost hypnotic. The issue I have with it though are its generalizations and some of the conclusions and supposed insights, which are sometimes obvious, and sometimes just derived out of flimsy reasoning, derived from somewhat dubious or arbitrary premises.

The individual/collective dichotomy is strained at best, and could be challenged by many alternative arguments in the context of history and sociology. The technology part is interesting, but there is nothing new there. The political commentaries are also standard issue and a bit all over the place. The conspiracies narrative, again, selective and based on certain opinions and aspects, ignoring others, which is the approach in the film overall. That's fine it it is supposed to show only the author's POV, but here it seems to aspire to reveal some deep universal truths, and in that it fails through a faulty - or deliberately tendentious - methodology.

Overall, it's a fascinating series, but I think the author overreached in his ambition to tell a grand narrative that explains everything.

Schitzophrenic, complex, profound and revealing. Seemingly unrelated stories intertwine with others to tell new stories if their own. Reality and fantasy intertwine and influence eachother on an international scale. I've only learned of Alex Curtis recently, but I can comfortably say he's a creative genius.

How come we live in a world where toxic nonsense like Q-Anon is so widely believed? To address this question, Adam Curtis has made his most ambitious documentary series yet, essentially a personal history of the modern world. His thesis appears to be that the answer lies in the loss of political ambition coupled with the ever growing power of the new technology (whose greatest power, he suggests, is to convince us that it can indeed control us). As usual, he shows a great aptitude for digging out extraordinary, obscure stories and moreover finding great footage to illustrate them. Also as usual, the narrative is sprawling and Curtis has a certain join-the-dots tendency of his own that might not seem completely alien to that of the conspiracy theorists that are his part of his subject matter. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this programme is that it takes as unquestioned that the story of just about every major country is one of decline and failure. Planet earth faces many major problems, not least global warming, but the world has never been perfect and to summarise recent history solely in terms of "things fall apart" while urging the populous to adopt (unspecified new forms of) societal optimism is frankly bizarre. Ultimately, Curtis' conclusions are of less value than the extraordinary journey he takes to reach them. He himself certainly does not lack ambition; there's a self-indulgence here, but also a hundred strange tales that make you think about the world.