Solemplex
To me, this movie is perfection.
Jonah Abbott
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
raghavnyati
I admire the way the episodes are narrated. Definitely a must watch for everyone History aficionado.
keninoldtown
The Trump of the left rewrites history into an extreme exaggeration of what used to be modest lies to whip up emotions for a brainwashed following. His portrayal of the US as the bad guy in WW2 is beyond absurd. His portrayal of Stalin as a guy who was just looking out for his country's best interest is horrifying and absurd. Luckily I watched this when my Ukrainian wife was not present. This guy was a joke when he supported Chavez and company and he is still a liar. Difference is now that the country is becoming polarized, people like Oliver Stone, Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, etc are getting larger audiences of people looking to reinforce an extreme world view.
earthinspace-1
These episodes are a good addition to the mental library of a serious history buff. For a big-picture treatment, this series does make quite a few boo-boos at the big-picture level. Examples:1) We hear several times a thesis that "Stalin always kept his word, so why didn't we make better friends with him?" Back at home, Stalin wasn't keeping his word very well. Should we have ignored what was occurring in the Soviet Union? Sure, there's occasional mention of Stalin's brutality. It seems thrown in, to avoid omitting it altogether.2) We hear that Japan was ready to surrender and Truman wanted to use the bomb as leverage at Potsdam. That's a reasonable thesis. But that was only part of the picture. It cannot stand alone. If we examine everyone's motives at the time, as this film partly did, what emerges is not the simple feeling we get from the film: "America bad, Japan not as bad." Still, it's fine to have these details offered up. They even mention the 45,000 Korean slaves who were in Hiroshima on that tragic day.In hindsight, Oliver Stone's ideas are okay as learning opportunities. It's not fair to assume that Americans living in the mid-20th Century should have known then what we know now. But it's fair to second-guess them now as a meditation for future use. That will happen to our times too.I've watched the first five episodes and plan to watch the rest.
MisterWhiplash
The whole thrust of this and much of the content reminds me of the line from Stone's own JFK when going over some initial pieces of potential evidence on Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination conspiracy: "There's a lot of smoke here, but where there's smoke, there's fire." This series, a major work for Oliver Stone, gets going through the premise that Henry Wallace, a true progressive in the early 1940's democratic party, could have been a true force for change but was shut out of the 1944 convention, leading to Harry S. Truman as FDR's newest vice president. The 'would-be' part of it is certainly intriguing, and the evidence seems to have credibility (Stone narrates it all), but even if it's phooey and the claims against Truman may be harsh, the fact still stands on who dropped the first nuclear Atomic bombs on a (at the time enemy) country, leading to a nuclear arms race and the Cold War for decades to come.There's so much here over the course of some ten or more hours that it may be hard to all take in at once. It may not be that kind of experience, perhaps better to not binge-watch but take in over a week or several nights. It's a full course meal of information which is certainly not something that is ra-ra pro-American (but you should hopefully know that, even coming from his quintessential film, Platoon, where the climax of that was the Americans losing to the Vietnamese in a brutal battle). There's much that you also won't possibly expect that isn't necessarily *all* about the United States which is the fascinating part; just how much Russia was crucial in World War 2 and how their casualties were so catastrophic, but yet eclipsed in the pages of history by other countries losses. Or the details surrounding just how damn close the US did come to war with Russia over the Cuban missile crisis. Or so many other, nasty things.I think Stone is coming from a hopeful place here, and his damnations and critique aren't from a complete crank and blow-hard. He may have that in him, but his intentions are pure and with an intent of consciousness expansion: get you thinking about things, maybe you go find information for yourself, and don't always tow the line on everything you're told (not just Americans, around the world is the key point I think, though especially Americans). It's an overview of the past 70 years as only Oliver Stone can do it, and it's exhilarating, befuddling, infuriating, perplexing, terrifying, sad and perhaps questionable stuff. But that's better than something you can easily digest with your stick-in-the-mud grandpa, right?
