This film is an appropriate end to the “X Files” era of government conspiracy thinking.
Fight the Future!
Mel Gibson is a loopy, schizoid, paranoid cabbie afraid of everything and everybody. Julia Roberts is a cardboard lawyer with a one dimensional view of life like we are all supposed to have.
Fifteen years ago, this was almost a comedy.
These days it’s a prophetic view of horrors to come. We all know now, that conspiracy is how corporations make profits, how governments practice bribery, and how brave citizens who dare to buck the status quo are strapped into a straitjacket and locked away for life.
Most people are so ignorant of the news that anybody who can string two sentences together about current events is suspected of being a conspiracy theorist.
The NASA space shuttle program is going to be cancelled? The International Space Station will be blown up in eight years and made to crash into the Pacific Ocean? The U.S. will have to pay Russia to get heavy payloads and astronauts into orbit?
This film shows people exactly what the government wants us to think of conspiracy theorists — paranoid, bizarre peeping toms with latent psychological and sexual issues bordering on the psychotic.
Mel Gibson plays the perfect eccentric with bouts of lucidity amid stretches of angst laced with psychosis. Julia Roberts is the perfect foil (the person to whom we are supposed to relate to) in her skepticism of Gibson’s vile behavior and revolting ideas.
Just think about all that has happened since this film was made in 1997 — the dot com bust, the 2001 recession the terror attacks on New York City, the $4 trillion war in Iraq, the $2 trillion war in Afghanistan, an increase in our national debt from $5 trillion to $15 trillion, the Great Recession of 2008, the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial meltdown, ten million home foreclosures, the $ trillion Wall Street bail out, to name just a few.
Any film posing any ONE of these horiffic scenarios in the late 1990’s would have been perceived as millennium madness, much less a film anticipating them ALL.
Conspiracy theorists get no respect.
