Orwell: 2+2=5

Watched at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Raoul Peck has always been an underrated filmmaker who has made great documentaries in his career. With his latest focusing on the works of George Orwell, Peck goes raw with the portrait of Orwell's work and purpose. Providing a strong and powerful anti-fascist documentary and demonstrating the warnings, meaning and realism of what Orwell has said, and focused on.

Using great colorful presentations, interesting editing choices and presentation, Peck's direction on how information is presented, described and situated feels striking, important and engaging. With narration of the writings Orwell speaking, many of the themes, topics and concepts explored throughout were intriguing, as it reflects on what Orwell viewed about the world, the negative effects of fascism and the warnings about how reality and society can be changed because of politics and the dark humanities of human worlds. Alongside with using archival footage and interesting creative choices on the sound designs, visuals and presentation, it doesn't shy away from being quite loud, and raw. Allowing the views to see the negative effects about totalitarianism and the brutality of it.

I'm honestly quite surprised this movie got made, especially since our current political times is very messy. Overall, Raoul Peck has made his most angry and raw documentary in his entire career. A striking and powerful documentary that does reflect a lot about the current United States of America and the Trump Administration.

"Orwell: 2+2=5" is one of the most viscerally frightening films I've seen in years, not slasher scary, but that slow-boil dread of realizing we're the frog in the pot and the water has long been simmering. Raoul Peck (whose James Baldwin documentary was luminous) assembles archival footage, Orwell's own words, and a brisk intellectual biography to show exactly how his warnings in "1984" have seeped into the marrow of modern life. The throughline from Orwell's vision to our surveillance capitalism, doublespeak, and billionaire techno-authoritarianism lands like a gutpunch. With every movement recorded, every stray thought mined by the almighty algorithm, I'm left wondering how did we allow this to happen when visionaries spelled it out for us so clearly? Peck threads together Orwell's experiences, the Iraq War's manufactured truth, the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, and the historical rewriting of January 6th with chilling clarity. It's heavy, frightening, and eye-opening. We stumbled onto it via a Top 10 list and now I can't stop thinking about it.

Had high hopes for this movie to examine Orwell's thoughts on political systems and regimes with in-depth focus on parallels to modern day "newspeak" and breaking of collective willpower, but it does none of that. It's a series of sometimes no context images of death and dictators and Adobe Affect Effects text animations that are played along with snippets from his diary about his life. It does give more context about his writing, but no context for the historical events it shows or why it chooses to focus so heavily on Burma. It doesn't bring in any other historians or political analysts until the end and it's very brief and superficial. It primarily felt like I was watching a collection of movie clips of 1984 versions. Overall, I appreciate the subject matter and the recency of the content (e.g., the inclusion of the Gaza genocide and the MAGA ambivalence towards death for "the other team") but the movie wasn't as thought provoking as I was hoping and felt more like SparkNotes to 1984 for a Gen X audience, nothing groundbreaking if you've already read 1984 and have a basic understanding of politics and injustice.

If the intention was to present a "shrill trumpet-call" in imitation of an Inner Party-directed Hate Week project, then mission accomplished.

The narrated George Orwell excerpts outshine anything assembled by the writer / director whose own political bias and blind spots mirror an Orwell quotation that's cited early in the film: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude". IMO, Orwell: 2+2=5 is a political attitude that lacks artistry. Images and video are presented in a "We didn't start the fire" stream; there is no depth, no context and not even a discussion of the title formula, just clips from past portrayals of 1984. Overall, it's clumsily designed to manipulate the hate-filled and uninformed. It will do well in some circles.

Skip this film; better to read Mr. Orwell and a good Orwell biography.

The best I can say about Orwell: 2+2=5 is that the anticipation of seeing it encouraged me to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I did also appreciate the clip from Terry Gilliam's Brazil; isolating the copy room scene made me wonder about the great preparation that was necessary to make the movements so fluid.

Watched it recently at a film festival. Go see it if you don't mind a tedious preachy clip show of historical footage with frequent bland voiceovers narrating Orwell's words, often with the background of a slow-moving vista of dull dreary Scotland. This sort of work comes off as a naive high school politics student trying to be original and edgy, since the film goes down the same predictable politically one-sided narratives (complete with sentimental instrumental soundtrack). Essentially a sophomoric propaganda piece with stale observations about government power that are already known by anyone familiar with Orwell's main works. Couldn't take it anymore, and we walked out near the end.

Edit: on second thought, I give it 2 stars instead of 1. The part about Orwell's time in Burma was mildly interesting.