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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.

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.

This is a documentary that people need to watch. It's informative in a way I have never seen on TV before and will help people of all political divides to make their minds up as to weather their political beliefs are accurate.

From other reviews you will gather that it is about politics, money, power, The West, the Middle East, and how politicians are trying to re-establish some form of control by lying to you.

My review is to encourage you to watch this because of the future of the internet. INFORMATION IS POWER.

Today questions are being put forward in parliament about how to control the internet - this documentary will both inform you about how important this is and possibly scare you about who might be setting the controls.

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.

With a £30k budget and an amazing flair for story-telling, the director takes us on a journey through post-WW2 history and the circumstances as to why we are in this disillusioned state so many political agendas seem to be supporting.

This is great viewing and really gets you to think hard about the issues that matter: nothing can truly be explained by a 140-character tweet and that's exactly the problem: the world is too interlinked and complex to be understood via superficial analysis nor poetic slogans.

We need to collectively understand the deeper issues at hand, and find the solution that deals at source - building walls, imperial slogans, bigotry and racist knee-jerk responses are not the way

Peace

HyperNormalisation is a film about the Western media conditioning and the complexities of it. What makes Adam Curtis so strong here is his tone of voice. He states complex observations about politics and media as facts, weaponizing visual media to critique visual media. By making such a complicated -- polarizing -- documentary in such a straight-forward, expository, way he allows audiences to be lead down a rabbit hole of sorts.

Whether or not we as an audience agree with individual pieces and arguments within this film, it's impossible to ignore that Curtis is using the tools, tone, and legitimization (thank you BBC) of the "brainwasher" to brainwash audiences against brainwashing, and to stimulate critical thought. These clever tricks makes this one of the best documentaries ever made, as it continually challenges the viewer's intelligence and perception of the world. There are many documentaries that make more factual, easy-to-prove arguments -- but this film does not intend to do that. Instead, HyperNormalisation challenges the audience with a 3 hour barrage of questions, often stated in the form of answers. How Curtis arrives at these answers creates one of the most thought-provoking films of the 21st century. The point is to not accept Curtis's sometimes shaky (perhaps only in the interest of keeping the runtime down, perhaps not) arguments as facts, but rather to consider them. If you are looking for a simple documentary that is easily proven factually true, this is not it. In fact, HyperNormalisation seems to suggest that form of documentary may not exist.

This film is not an answer, but a question. If you disagree with Curtis, read some books and articles and prove him wrong on your own, if you can. Either way you'll be a better and more educated person for watching this film. HyperNormalisation takes more than it's already 2 and half hour runtime to watch. I paused, researched, and questioned the entire time. HyperNormalisation requires fact checking and educating oneself on aspects of world politics restricted from mainstream thought, and asking questions about the "answers" he provides. Whether a deranged conspiracy theorist or one of the greater minds of the 21st century is up to the viewer, but either way Adam Curtis successfully challenges his audience with this film. Though I don't fully agree with everything put forth in this film, I have to admit that more and more about HyperNormalisation rings true to me in the present day than when it was created. Thank you Curtis for making me think about the world in this way.

Oh, and the soundtrack is incredible. : - )

Adam again used his deconstructivist style in order to reach the un-result leaving the viewer mesmerized and perplexed by what s/he should hold as truth in this world. The soundtrack of the documentary is similar to his previous documentary "Bitter Lake" with the acid music and also the colors in the movie are really sharp with raw footage that are unedited maybe to reflect the real world he's trying to unravel to the laymen. Again, he blames the finance men for the troubles that are happening around the world and also the politicians who gave up their powers to them by letting them have more than it is supposed to be. However, he has some inaccuracies in terms of some cases especially to what is happening in the Arab world. In other words, he may have even fallen in the perception management that he described in his documentary. In general, his documentary is mind opening to question the reality that is surrounding us.

Thought provoking illustration of a moment in time and how the events lead up to it, both as poignant as they are eclectic, contribute to the current social and economic climate of today.

Adam Curtis is a talented film-maker. He has an ability to locate interesting clips, audio, and stories; and to draw previously un-remarked parallels between them. His weakness lies in his tendentiousness; not every parallel is a cause, and his tendency to make numerous, semi-random connections can obscure any final point. His most over-used word is "then" - things do happen, one after the other, but the order of succession is not always noteworthy. I watched a live interview with him a couple of years ago, in which he covered some of the themes in his film 'HyperNormalisation', and his answered ranged from perceptive to exasperating ("the politicians have let us down by not providing us with something to believe in", he said, but seemed to have no idea himself about what that something could be). The way to take his films, I think, is to look for the nuggets, those strange stories you haven't heard of before which just might be worth giving a little more thought to. 'HyperNormalisation' itself is nearly three hours long, and could fairly be described as rambling. But it's great to look at and it does make you think.

A dense, eye-opening, rich and complex piece of art that presents itself clearly. I would recommend it to everyone. It covers a lot of ground but not for one second is it unfocused and every beautiful thread weaves together with some of the most artistic and unique and harrowing images I've ever seen. It's still present, its editing is phenomenal and it's probably one of the most important, relevant and modern things I've ever seen. I'm aware of the irony of posting this review on Facebook. I think a part of Hypernormalisation is that it is the mirror it speaks of and it is holding itself up against us. Which is hard to bear, but vital and rare.

Adam Curtis presents a view of a world where we are constantly deceived and controlled by bad actors or more accurately maybe, twisted characters, you know, not held enough by mum when they were babies. We don't have any buy-in to the future, we just have to watch the dreams of these twisted characters unfold and collide.

There are four main issues with his presentation. I believe he is a nice man, so I would classify these as errors. Firstly he implies that narrativization, simplification, theatre and confusion are somehow new developments in politics, this is not actually true, they have been ever present since a city was established on seven hills by the River Tiber. Donald Trump is not a new type of character on the political scene, as many sick politicians, with panoplies of personality disorders, have done their turn on the catwalk of power in the past.

Secondly, whilst he is striving for a neutrality of sorts, he simply is unaware of the political right wing, and where their discontent arises; this is partly because the political right became an oblique presentation: after defeats in progressive battlegrounds like racism and women's rights, conservatism went guerrilla. Conservatives in fact learned many lessons from the left, particularly the importance of social media. Conservatives became very cautious about their statements, presenting themselves as victims of continuous change and cultural uncertainty, not the skinheads of old who posted dog mess through letterboxes of people with different skin colours. Progressives on the other hand throw all caution to the wind, teaching small children of a supposedly bewlidering array of genders. This was done in a well meaning way, but with no more rigour than that which the phrenologists of yore employed. All Curtis is really able to do when talking about the alt right is to make vague Tolkien-esque allusions to forces of darkness welling up at the edges of Middle Earth.

Thirdly, a film of his is an assault of propaganda techniques. Granted he is not trying to delude his audience, he is a man of integrity, but of course, no-one on the right would ever give him that benefit of the doubt when faced with the bombardment of manipulation.

Fourthly the segues between topics are often extremely tenuous. An example from the film would be going from algorithms to Donald Trump via a bizarre anecdote about the Yakuza fleecing one of his casinos.

I learn a lot when watching his films, he's an introducer of topics, he brought an emotional texture to Hafez al-Assad's life for example, and I did not know about the effective bankruptcy of New York. Also if you accept the manipulation, like an innocent at a magic show, HyperNormalisation is enjoyable to watch.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of the film isn't really political, per se, it's when Curtis mentions a US government security algorithm, optic nerve, which discovers that people are in large part using streaming for sexual purposes, they want to broadcast their organs. Most people are not sophisticated, they are not using the internet to learn or conspire. If, as it turns out, we are simply lustful monkeys, is a conservative an unreasoning monkey who wants to hold on to whatever they have (either cultural, polticial or physical capital) no matter what the cost, and a progressive an unreasoning monkey who wants to make leaps into the dark, and seeing their hands empty, want to grab from the conservatives? Whilst the world becomes ever more complex, we humans are not becoming more complex, we are bound in by the finite capcaity of our memories, lifespans, empathy, and intelligences. Welcome to the chimp's tea party.

A fascinating dive into the current world of politics and the vast significant changes worldwide over the past 30-40 years which have seen a change in systems and beliefs. This documentary provides the facts behind political conflict and gives reason for particular events which have triggered truly shocking outcomes. The run time might be off putting but this is an important watch

Hypernormalisation is an interesting film. I think when watching it you have to keep in mind that more than anything Adam Curtis is an idealist and he is telling you a story more so than he's telling you a history. Some of the historical details aren't really up to snuff but the overarching point is what's really important I think. I don't agree with a lot of Curtis' conclusions but his ultimate point about politics becoming this hypernormalised spectacle is one that is very worthwhile.

Starting from 1975, with two shots of Damascus and Newyork, Adam curtis investigates two ways of running the world. The banks were lending a lot of money to politicians in the 1975 but that suddenly stopped. From Banks to politics spanning the globe from Russia,Syria,Lebanon, to Lybia,Iran, the US, and ending with an Arab Spring. We can see how main players in the world were either pawns in a game of chess or fake players to distort perception. Hypernormalization is the term used to describe the attempts to promote a fake image of the world and make it the normal. Wiliam Gibson introduced the term Cyberspace negatively and then the decalration of independance of Cyberspace came along and then computers and the internet make cyberspace invidualist's dream. The film is full of events from protests all over the world and major political events and repercussions of big decisions made by politics. I find it hard to write in a clear manner about what i saw as it is a jumbled mass of complex politics of the old world where reality was still physical to a new system of cyberspace reality influencing events in the real world and a politics driven by shapeshifting and unrecognizable fake reality where the truth become irrelevant and people are parts of the node on a network of ever complicated reality.

You're going to get a all-encompassing collage of events and people and places and moments in time for the purpose of imparting how the world has descended to where it is now (and was in 2016). What you're seeing is the why and how, not anything about how to escape it or change it. This might leave you cynical or depressed or it might not. Up to you. Like what you take from this, it's up to you.

This is questionable in many ways but visually stunning. Curtis goes over the history of Western relations with Libya's Qadaffi, along with references to Hamas, suicide bombings, the Assads in Syria, Blair, Bush II, and Donald Trump. It is hard to understand what he is getting at, but the main idea seems to be that world leaders are using technology to manipulate people.

I really don't know what to say about his political views. At one point I thought of him as a radical moderate. Clearly he looks for drama and irony. It all may just be an excuse to string together some exciting news videos. Is there anyone who weaves together news and stock footage in the way that he does?

Get comfy, pack a bowl (of popcorn) and let Adam Curtis take you on a three hour psychedelic trip through modern history cut into pieces and shaken up into a beautiful puzzle, complete with various bangers and brilliant storytelling.

"2001 of history documentaries" (put this one on the box)

Examples, strategies of successful changes made to a family scapegoat system. Because there are no successful examples, otherwise the power structure itself would have changed. Humans have invested in this scapegoat mechanism and blindly went into this: people are so deeply a part of the family scapegoat system that any and all attempts to change it ultimately fail.

I had watched this in 2019, maybe not getting until the end. There are some deep flaws in this documentary, which did not let me get to the end of it the first time. So I will begin with these.

This movie has an idea, about internet, for example, and about Middle East politics. It tries to show the facts which are in agreement with the idea. Conveniently ignoring those facts that tend to go against the idea. I will try to give some examples without spoilering too much (but can you... spoiler a documentary?). It is stated that current politics takes decisions in incoherent ways and sows confusion intentionally without a definite end except avoiding risk - I might agree with the general message. Yet, the Russian intervention in Syria is presented as one of those "inexplicable decisions" taken without a reason and not understandable. This completely ignores that:

1 - Russia has maritime bases in Syria, and would most probably lose them if Syria became Isis land - this alone justifies intervention 2 - Russia - with all her ills - does consistently fight islamism which was rising in Syria

Also about Internet. Gibson is put in contrast with the EFF and its activism. Internet is shown as only a place where people can run away to hide from their failures in changing society. This place is ruled by malevolent corporations - this ignores the fact people all over the world do find *real* freedom through the Internet. In many different ways, the Internet did enable real, sincere expression of ideas which would have been impossible before. Many examples of this might be shown, but they are avoided because they would not support the idea behind the documentary. This is, in a way, a manipulation of reality just the same as the one which is exposed in the movie.

In any case, this movie came to my mind again during the Covid epidemics. And after watching the 2020 US elections...I revalued the general message, which is not perfect, but does offer interesting thought points such as:

• Politics does tend to create a perception of reality which is convenient to its means - this increases the detachment between politics and the voters, which do participate in the political process, but they do it mechanically and out of habit, fully knowing that the political ideas are out of touch with reality - because of blatantly absurdity - but in a way, avoiding to confront reality. This is a deep message which the movie does bring across and which is ... real. Evident all over this crisis.

• The Internet does contain information which could "save" the people and bring out reality. Because of how Internet is used, however, people tend to isolate themselves in bubbles where their own biases are reinforced. Or even brought to their extreme. This is well explained and researched.

The two "thoughts" this movie gave me are enough for it to deserve a 7. But they many distorted realities inside this very movie make it, sometimes, similar to a propaganda piece. Which makes me unable to give it more than a 7.