Orwell 2+2=5: If only it weren't true

Orwell 2+2=5 (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); rated R, for violent content and brief graphic nudity

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world. Lies will pass into history.”

 

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, wrote those words in a 1946 essay titled Politics and the English Language.

 

This film concludes as shoppers in a typical American mall are blind to the three key
tenants of George Orwell's 1984 that surround them: War Is Peace, Ignorance Is
Strength, and Freedom Is Slavery.

Perceptive and prophetic as he was, Orwell never could have imagined the degree to which those words would become even more accurate, in this third decade of the 21st century.

Director Raoul Peck’s biographical quasi-documentary also is equal parts disturbing teller of truth … although, as Orwell himself would have cautioned, whose truth?

 

This film should be required viewing by every adult in these United States. Many will embrace it willingly, attuned to the terrifying, clear-cut path that both Orwell and Peck have blazed, illustrating the current world-wide slide from democracy into fascism.

 

As for those who would prefer to ignore or dismiss its message, perhaps they should be strapped to chairs with their eyes held open — as with Malcolm McDowell, in 1971’s A Clockwork Orange — and forced to watch … if only to see themselves, and their hatreds, laid bare.

 

Peck’s film is by no means perfect; his pacing is too leisurely at times, and his enraged, wide-ranging reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. The result can feel overwhelming.

 

Virtually all of the narrative text in Peck’s film comes from Orwell’s written words — from his books, essays, personal letters and diary entries — as somberly read by Damian Lewis. The timeline of Orwell’s life — from early childhood to his death in January 1950, only half a year after 1984 was published — is intercut with clips of events from the early 20th century to mere months before this film was completed.

 

Some of this real-world footage is horrifying; one photographic still, in particular, is gut-wrenching. Other bits are scary for an entirely different reason: the blandness with which despots spread lies and distort reality.

 

Peck also inserts telling scenes from numerous big-screen versions of 1984 — mostly the 1956 Edmond O’Brien and 1984 John Hurt adaptations — along with similarly telling sequences from 2018’s Fahrenheit 451, 2002’s Minority Report and 1985’s Brazil.

 

It quickly becomes clear that we now live in an era of Orwellian “Newspeak,” which he defined as “political language designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable.”

 

An Inconvenient Sequel: On the road again, with Al Gore

An Inconvenient Sequel (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.11.17

Accidentally or intentionally, justifiably or unfairly, in the moment or only through the lens of history, great events of progressive socio/economic change often become associated with a single individual.

Standing at the foot of Greenland's rapidly dwindling Russell Glacier, former U.S. Vice
President Al Gore sadly contemplates the implication of all this ice melt, and the impact
that so much water will have, throughout the world.

John Muir, and the modern environmental movement. Upton Sinclair, and working-class labor reform. Mahatma Gandhi, and nonviolent civil disobedience. Rosa Parks, and the civil rights movement.

Al Gore, and climate crisis.

That modifier is intentional and preferable, because the phrase “climate change” isn’t getting the job done; it’s much too passive. Human beings don’t respond to “change,” because it sounds slow, and therefore easy to ignore. Why bother, folks are inclined to think; it won’t matter during my lifetime.

A crisis, however, is an entirely different issue ... and the climate situation definitely is a crisis. At this point, nay-saying ostriches have about as much credibility as the Flat Earth Society, or those who believe Elvis still lives, or those who insist that the Moon landing was concocted on a secret Hollywood sound stage.

And yet there are so many nay-saying ostriches.

Everybody associates former U.S. vice president Al Gore with 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, although director Davis Guggenheim certainly deserves much of the credit; he’s the one who carried home an Academy Award, a Humanitas Prize and dozens of film festival and Critics Circle awards. But Gore remains most associated with the film — no surprise — because it profiled his relentless march on the lecture and conference circuit, sounding the alarm about the dangers of global warming and climate crisis.

For the most part, he preached to the converted; the film frequently was ridiculed, in many cases reflexively, along political lines ... as if a pending global crisis were something that affected only Democrats and liberals, and could be ignored safely by Republicans and conservatives.

But the mere fact that An Inconvenient Truth provoked debate, was good enough. There’s also no question that the film played an important role in what has come to be known as the “sustainability revolution.”

Plenty of people also jeered at 1989’s Roger & Me, but — similarly — there’s no question that Michael Moore started something, and opened a lot of eyes.