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Not his best by any means. As has been said elsewhere it is way longer than it needed to be. Then again so was Bitter Lake and that seems a much better film after a second viewing. His films on consumer culture, Freud, the roots of Thatcherism, zero sum game thinking etc were IIRC all far shorter and much more illuminating. However they do rely on a fair amount of pre-existing knowledge which frankly is going to absent for a lot of viewers. Especially when it comes to foreign affairs. So it may be that going for repetition over a longer running time is his way of drumming the information into us. Also in this age of resistance to any kind of complexity there is a lot to be said for anyone trying to work with longer formats. Just cos this one wasn't all that successful does not mean there isn't a good three hour film on geo-politics waiting to be made. Speaking of which, the third part of Robbie Martin's "A Very Heavy Agenda" on the fall and rise of the new-cons, (itself heavily influenced by Curtis) comes in at over three and a half hours!
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