One of the wrost movies I have ever seen

Fantastic!

Excellent, a Must See

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Adam Curtis is a master at great montage, using music, images, and hysterical narration to illustrate points that are often valid but sometimes boldly deceptive and downright misguided."HyperNormalisation" is one of the best of examples of both the good and bad of Curtis' documentaries. Parts about the manipulation of popular perceptions by politicians and corporations are effective and make great sense. One of the best moments is when Curtis juxtaposes the assassination of Romania's Mr. and Mrs. Nicolae Ceaușescu with images from Jane Fonda's workout video, illustrating how the old world of the Cold War was being replaced by a new one, where individuals are distracted by trivia, and where new enemies either emerge or are created.The tension builds as Colonel Qaddafi gets remolded from an international pariah into a temporary good guy -- only to be vilified once again and killed. The problem with the film really starts here: nowhere does Curtis stress that Obama and Hillary were in charge at the time of this hypocritical about-face. Hillary's infamous "We came, we saw, he died" remark would have added so much more power to Curtis' point and to his narrative. And it would have made him seem much more evenhanded in his judgments.This film came out, however, just when Donald Trump won the Republican Presidential nomination. And by the tone Curtis takes when speaking of Trump, viewers can assume Curtis favored Hillary's victory. So, he appears to have manipulated his film with the pending U.S. election in mind.Reagan and George W. are generously faulted throughout the film for their roles in international mischief, but the slight presence of Obama and Hillary, and the continual castigation of Trump (who was yet to prove himself on the political stage) makes this film -- despite its many poignant moments -- an ultimate failure. Curtis is himself guilty of the "perception management" that he tries to fault throughout.

As practically any political documentary these days, this one isn't interesting because of the "facts" it reveals, but rather because of what it chooses to omit and how information is manipulated to pass for a chain of events. The most interesting observation can be summarized in an axiom: the broader (not just) a documentary's subject is, the more likely it substitutes hard facts with the film maker's personal beliefs.One very obvious omission is that Salafism isn't even mentioned once. Salafism has been taught at Sunni theological schools at least since the 1920s, Salafism is the backbone of al-Quaida, all 9/11 attackers were Salafists, Daesh is Salafist, all individual terrorists in Europe had Salafist connections. To claim that the source of modern terrorism is Syria's Shia dictator Assad is definitely a lie. I don't know whether this means that this is a propaganda effort( the Saudis and their dirty war in Yemen are suspiciously omitted), or whether the author is simply going for the ultimate "everything-is-connected" effect - that would be very BBC. Either way, this causality construction presents a deliberate manipulation of facts that can be easily counter-checked.Another prominent claim of this film is that Ghaddafi was never a real threat to the Western world and merely set up as a stooge to cover up terrorist bombings actually committed by Syria or Hezbollah. There is no convincing argument delivered why this should be the case. The film maker argues that the US wanted to somehow cooperate with Syria, when all the hard facts point to the opposite. If you're into conspiracy theory, one might argue that the Ghaddafi's fall intensified the refugee crisis in the EU, which would then be the ultimate target of everything the US messes up. If you're not a conspiracy fan, you might as well go with "if nobody knows anything, you gotta do something, so that it seems you know everything".Another claim is that Assad used Hezbollah for suicide attacks against soft targets as a revenge for Kissinger's obstruction of a unified Arab world. That concept, however, originated with Egypt's Nasser in the 1950s, and the first organized terror attack in the Western world was the PLO's assassination of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. It was the Sunni PLO that Shia Hezbollah learned terror from, not Hamas from Hezbollah after the Sabra/Shatila massacres of 1982. Just look at the sequence of events, people. The OPEC siege, Entebbe, Mogadischu, all that happened before and had multiple causes.What is true, however, is the assessment that the failure of the Arab Spring and the failure of Occupy can be traced to what I hold to be the only profound statement made in this film: that the internet may have the power to bring people together against something, but cannot substitute an alternative idea. Today's protest movements all fail because they are not based on an underlying concept. Curtis should have added that, as a consequence, their failure cannot be ascribed to Islam. It's rather the incapability of an internet image culture to formulate strategy and organize leadership - just look at the Pirate Party, or #Black Lives Matter's strategic error not to reach out to Hispanics, which would multiply their base.Another interesting bit is the piece on Russian media manipulation by Putin's confidant Surkov, supporting both protest groups and right-wing nationalists in an attempt to rile them up against each other - inspired by absurdist theater - which is fascinating. This is, alas, only mentioned in passing - the focus drifts to Trump's campaign and culminates in the common theme of keeping the public in a disorganized state of uncertainty in the face of an ever changing narrative. However, this is not a new idea as this film may make you think, but in fact a cornerstone of postmodern philosophy and media theory (just google Postman).So watch this with caution. There are some good points to take home with, but the alternative reality this film constructs is just as unconvincing as the official story. The simple truth to a slightly older academic like me is that today nobody knows anything anymore because they're constantly overloaded with useless info. The film maker walked right into this trap himself, by coming up with his specific "what if" scenario, and then eliminating every fact that doesn't work with his interpretation from his film.

If you press a mute button from start to end of this film you could easily come up with more than a hundred and two tales or narratives. Bits and pieces of everything from news clips, ads, horror films, etc are taken out of their contexts and squeezed into a conspiracy theme, stretched out to a very dull, incoherent and lengthy yarn without any clear cut definitions or objectives except to scare viewers out of their wits. There are plenty of wits and imagination in this film. However, the real world is not causal and two dimensional. Curtis appears to ignore the fact that politics is a game of interests where the rules are ever changing. The game-changers are not always politicians or financial behemoths. Events can take on their own momentum without any ultimate goals. Consequences could be catastrophic and beyond anybody's controls. This film is definitely not a documentary that anyone can rely on to verify any information. If anything, it only sheds light on the increasingly deluded mind of Curtis whose obsession with hidden sinister global manipulators borders on a sense of paranoid. This feeling of insecurity is exactly what he wants to evoke among viewers. He's been trying to do just that since his first film "The Century of Self" over a decade ago. To be fair, I don't think Curtis himself has any cruel intention that he wants to impose on global population. Ambitious as he is, it's obvious from all his efforts that Curtis himself can't even separate facts from fantasy. You can find thousands of similar "documentaries" to this "Hyper-Normalisation" on Youtube.

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.