Micheal Redford
1984

We all know what it means to talk about "1984": a prophetic, immortal work, the very archetype of an entire literary genre, as celebrated as it is ironically misunderstood. And if not to further explain the "salvific" message of this work to the ignorant masses (for many, the title is nothing more than a Van Halen album!), I see no reason this film should have been released: just to be clear, I didn't like this movie.

Flat, boring, and moreover, inconclusive: the irony is that it is precisely the power of the image that "destroys" the true message of the work, which is, a vision of the world not bound in a context of time and space, but essentially symbolic and transcendent, intrinsically philosophical. Years later, not a day goes by without connecting some aspect of the reality we are living in to "1984", while what I remember from the film are the female protagonist's backside and the constant gray tone that dominates the entire movie, and not even John Hurt's presence is enough to lift the tone a bit.

The entire message gets sweetened, institutionalized, stripped of any communicative power precisely because it's relegated to an alarming mannerism, which means, you might say? I don't bear chains, suits, numbers on my arm, so I am free, I don't see corpses in front of my house or raids, so we live in peace and serenity, I have no thoughts, worries, doubts or consequently interests and it is precisely thanks to this that I am happy: this is the great illusion, and this is the big problem of this film, which, with the undoubtedly honorable intent of making Orwellian thought more accessible, devalues it and debases it by making it a slave to appearances and the passage of time. And it is the same, vital, difference between dictatorship and totalitarianism: one puts you up against a visible, known enemy that exploits its power in equally tangible ways, while the other remains invisible, hidden, concealed, so that everyone thinks there is no trace of it, that it is all a bad memory of an inglorious past, while we are imposed one way of thinking, one way of acting, one way of living (examples? in some states the subcutaneous Microchip is already a reality).

Keiser Soze also said it, "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist..."