I walked out of the cinema with a very simple thought: this is an important film. The kind of film I honestly think a lot more people should see.
What Peck does, at least how I experienced it, is put George Orwell’s warnings from 1948 next to what’s actually happened in the world since. Dictatorships, the rise of strongmen, Trump, the wars of Bush, the obscene power of billionaires, the way media and money shape what we’re allowed to see. It’s a bit like Orwell is holding up a sign from the past and Peck keeps saying: “Look. Here. See? This is what he meant. It is happening. Beware. It’s disturbing.”
##A dead writer speaking in the first person Formally, the film does something pretty bold: there’s a voice-over that talks in the first person, as if it is George Orwell. Well, he reads what Orwell wrote. I wondered if they used AI for it, but at the titleroll I saw someones name at the voice over.
How the film is built: past, present, repeat The film starts with telling the story behind Orwell’s pseudonym. George Orwell wasn’t his real name. The title is explained early on. From there, we move to his time in a sanatorium in the 1940s – I think around 1946 – where he was treated for tuberculosis.
Visually, Peck keeps doing the same thing in a good way: he lays things side by side. We see old photos and bits of footage of Orwell, we hear about that sanatorium, and at the same time we see extreme close-ups – they looked to me like little pieces of lungtissue or tubercolosis.
Then, over and over, the film jumps:
from Orwell’s words or books,
to later events: the rise of the Nazis, other dictatorships all over the world, Bush and Iraq, more recent conflicts, and finally Putin, Trump and AI.
The chapters often start with a quote on screen, or a date, a place, sometimes the title of a book. I actually liked how that was done graphically: for example, in the top right corner you’d see which year and where Orwell was (the sanatorium, an island, whatever), and in the lower corners names or events would pop up. It’s quite a lot of text, though. I really couldn’t read everything – you have to choose between reading and watching.
Sometimes I thought: I would have loved to read a detailed review before seeing this, just so I knew a bit better what to pay attention to. It’s a dense film. I’m sure I missed bits and pieces.
2 + 2 = 5 as a thread that keeps coming back I was very aware of the title and how often it returns, it’s not to miss. Not just as a slogan, but as a hook in the film. As a metaphorical evidence that Orwells visions came out.
There’s a scene with a young boy in a car sitting in the back seat with an older man. The man asks: “How much is 2 plus 2?” The boy says: “Four.” And the man says something like: never let anyone tell you it’s five. There are people who will try. Governments, regimes, people in power. Once they can force you to say 5 instead of 4, they basically own you.
Later in the film, we see other situations, interrogation, even with a lie detector, where an older man is again asked how much 2 plus 2 is. At first he still answers “four”. But as the pressure mounts and the question is repeated, his answer starts to wobble: “four… five… six… I don’t know anymore.” You literally see how uncertainty is produced.
Because I spent too much time on YouTube tutorials for filmmakers, I immediately thought of all that “you need a hook at the beginning” advice. In a cinema you don’t usually walk out, but Peck uses the same trick: that one idea, that little simple line from 1984, keeps coming back so often that you can’t forget it.
It doesn’t feel clever in a cute way; it feels threatening. It reminded me of Trump’s “alternative facts” and of how he shamelessly tells them in front of all the eyes of the world. Deep down the film is, for me, about exactly that: the relationship between truth, power and oppression. The word “oppression” is, I think, never actually spoken, but the entire film is soaked in it.
Animal Farm, pigs and one specific face Another thing the film did for me: it brought parts van Orwell back in my memory that I had long forgotten. Animal Farm, for instance, with the whole idea of pigs ruling the world.
Seeing that again, in combination with all the Trump footage next to the pig-elite of Animal Farm and, well… the analogy kind of writes itself. It gave me a dark little smile.
Inequality, Piketty and billionaires in space There’s a strong economic thread running through the film: the growing gap between rich and poor. Orwell’s ideas are connected to graphs that show how the richest 1% have pulled away from everyone else over roughly a century. The poor stay at the same level through time. At the start of the graph, the lines are still close together; at the end, the difference is gigantic.
I immediately thought of Thomas Piketty. The film has that same feeling of “you probably knew this was bad, but here’s how much worse it really is.”
Peck also shows the absurd side of billionaires: their toys, their rockets, the fact that while so many parts of the world are on fire, these guys are flying off into space for fun or ego. He doesn’t need to explain it in a voice-over; the images are enough. It’s ridiculous and putting things into place at the same time.
He also talks quite explicitly about the roles of the (social) media and billionaires – how a handful of people own so much of the information infrastructure. It’s not just about “public opinion”; it’s about the basic frame of reality that we move in.
Goose step and… ducks? geese? I don’t even know One fragment that really stuck with me is about the goose step – that hard, stamping military march used in countries like Nazi Germany, Russia, China, etc. The film explains that it’s basically designed to crush a person if needed. Power literally turned into a way of walking.
There’s also a remark about how, in England, people laughed at that march, so it never caught on there. I like that detail a lot: the same thing that terrifies in one context is ridiculous in another.
What I found visually attractive and funny is what Peck does after that: suddenly you see birds walking. In my memory they were ducks, which is a bit ironic because the march is called goose step. Maybe they actually were geese, and I just saw ducks. Either way, your brain immediately connects the two: a row of birds, mechanical steps, something between funny and unsettling.
It’s such a simple metaphor, but it works very well. And again: as a filmmaker I think, “ah, right, you can do that; you can be that playful with imagery.”
A village discussion: sharing the harvest There’s a scene, I don’t know if it’s archival or staged, that touches on socialism or maybe “real communism” i.e. not the one with the dictators but the theory of sharing it all. You see a couple of men and women in what looks like a village. Black and white, looks like old film footage. One is a farmer, the other something else (I missed it).
They’re talking about his field and the harvest. One of them says: look, that land produces way too much food for just you and your family. Shouldn’t we do this together? Shouldn’t the harvest be shared?
Then the camera zooms out and you suddenly see more people. Someone asks the group whether they agree with this more collective approach.
And then something happened that genuinely surprised me:
some people raise their hands,
some hesitate,
some don’t raise their hands at all.
To my eye it was almost balanced.
Naïvely, I had expected that everyone, especially in this kind of setting, would think “yes, fair sharing, obviously.” Apparently not. Even in a small, seemingly poor community, the idea of “we’ll do it together and share it”, is not automatically attractive. That small scene I will remember.
AI, voice and the way words are bent Right at the beginning, when I first heard “Orwell’s” voice, I actually wondered for a second if it had been generated by AI. Later the credits made clear it was an actor, but the thought was there. Given the themes of the film, I found that a funny little extra layer.
Later on, AI comes into the film explicitly, especially at the end. There’s a sequence where all kinds of terms appear on screen in all colours of the rainbow, the texts are animated. Under each one appears an equals sign, and then another phrase (in white): sometimes an explanation, sometimes a critique, sometimes almost a sarcastic translation.
I can’t quote any of them because it went too fast for me to remember, but the feeling of it was clear: our language is being bent, rebranded, redefined, especially around technology and power. It’s not just about what words we use; it’s about who gets to pin a meaning to them.
Trump’s tweets and the design of text Visually, the film spends quite a bit of time with Trump’s tweets and long-form texts. I loved how that was done.
The tweets show up full-screen, in a recognisable tweet-style box, but slightly restyled. The corners, for instance, are a bit rounded in a way that feels designed, not just like a screenshot. When a certain part of the text becomes important, that bit is highlighted: the background turns orange, the fragment pops out. It’s a very simple way of saying: “this line, look here.”
Later there’s a longer text – I think a newspaper article – in which Trump lists all the amazing things he claims to have done for America and the world. It’s basically one long self-congratulatory rant of alternative facts. Peck lets this text rush past faster and faster, until it’s completely unreadable. At some point you just see a stream of words and self-praise.
I really liked that as a visual idea: sometimes it’s not about letting the viewer read; it’s about letting them feel overwhelmed.
As someone who’s been told I handled archival material a bit too traditionally in a previous film, I paid a lot of attention to this. The same goes for how Peck treats old photos: darkening certain faces, lightening others, adding a subtle whoosh when he zooms in or out. It’s all relatively small, but it makes the material feel modern and alive. I’m definitely taking that with me.
Head and stomach: strangely not crushed With all these themes: Nazi imagery, dictatorships, war, inequality, Trump, AI, billionaire ego trips into space, you’d expect to come out of the cinema completely crushed.
I didn’t.
I also didn’t walk out smiling, to be clear. It’s not a happy film. But I wasn’t as down as I thought I would be. Somehow Peck manages to keep it watchable. There were a few moments where I almost laughed – not because it was truly funny, but because the absurdity and pain of it collided in a way that nearly tipped into humour.
I think that’s part of why I’d call it an “intellectual” film rather than a “gut punch” film. It works more in my head than in my tear ducts. Some reviewers find that a weakness; I’m not sure. For me it was the right balance. I had a lot to think about, but I could still breathe.
Social status One last thing that hit closer to home: Orwell reflects in the film on his own social status. Where he came from, the class he belonged to, how that coloured his view of the world.
That connected very directly with things I’ve been thinking about in my own life lately, also with AI’s help, funnily enough. About my own social position, financial insecurity, privilege, and the question: where do I actually stand in all this?
Seeing a writer like Orwell wrestle with similar questions made the film feel less abstract. It’s not just about “humanity” or “the masses”; it’s also about individual people who look at themselves and ask: what is my role in this story?
Would I recommend it? Yes.
Is it easy? No. Do I remember everything? Don’t think so. Did I see connections I wouldn’t have made by myself? Absolutely.
In that sense, I almost wish I could have read a long review like this before watching it. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this now: as a set of notes for myself, and as a small guide for anyone else who ends up in the cinema, listening to a dead writer say “I” while the world around him, and us, keeps insisting that 2 + 2 might be 5 after all.
Documentary analysis #4