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User Reviews for: Harrison Bergeron

LNero
5/10  7 months ago
Really poorly made across the board. It starts to make a couple of salient points about top-down entertainment programming, but fails to say anything meaningful about _why_ things are so fucking stupid in mass media. The (attempts) at drama and attempts at being philosophical (most) all feel like a TBN "Christians being oppressed by imaginary evil secularists" TV movie. I'm not saying the message is the same, but the—as moonkodi mentions—personal ranty-ness of the generally very poor writing comes off as sophomoric, and the acting direction is just bottom of the barrel. Christopher Plummer is always great, though.

I was bemused when Plummer's John Klaxon (lol) went on his "This is why things must be the way that we make them" diatribe, because I can't imagine what would possess someone to present *envy* as the reason for the atrocities of war. Just... what? And the film runs with this until the end, having Astin's Bergeron treat it like the real reason by the end of the film. A power differential supported by useful idiots is the reason atrocities happen, not envy.

Also, _Idiocracy_ is vastly superior to this in every way, and makes more sense as a parody of something that we are currently watching happen (a spiral of dysfunction due to degeneracy in government and broad society and a culture of LCD anti-intellectualism and Post-Reagan business/governmental socioeconomic policies). Although this film makes a couple of accurate-yet-obvious jabs at the low-brow nature of most television, and how it is actually made so that the stupidest and most incurious person watching can feel included (eg. Joey on "FREINDS".)

The romance is like watching a reverse-cucking Mormon snuff film.

Through its runtime, its tepidity is what damns it from being either an entertaining watch (it starts to approach being somewhat inspiring near the end, but that's still grading it on a handicapped curve), or a compelling piece of sociological science fiction. I can say it's not as despondently soul-crushing as watching _1984_, nor as cringe-inducing as watching _V for Vendetta_, but I could at least laugh at the supreme edgelordiness of _V_.
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