It's always been entertaining for me to watch vapid self-absorbed western(ized) "intellectuals" try real hard to read some deep, spiritual understanding of the human condition in the context of media related to the good old Soviet Union. These people are clearly cut from the same cloth as the useful idiots who tried to make a sage and a literary genius out of Solzhenitsyn but that's a matter for another roast.
If you're already someone desperate to be a proxy-depressed liberal (or conservative, same crap) waxing poetic about how badly the soviet people had it in the 1980s without ever having lived there or spoken to people who lived there and if your only "experience" of the USSR is from secondary sources with lets say an artistic license guided by a political motive, you might be tempted to buy the hilariously crappy reviews treating the movie as a masterpiece exposing deep layers of human misery encapsulated in the Soviet regime that a free thinking westerner could only imagine through the medium of cinema or literature.
Of course, as I said, if you're not the above, as in you're a normal human being, you won't read too much into this movie rather than somewhat politically filtered story about the banal nature of authority and it's abuse, something which clearly never takes place in our modern, capitalist, democratic nations.
In this aspect, the movie really provides ample opportunity for the western liberal to self-congratulate and virtue signal using the most cliched pseudo-intellectual posturing. In another one, this movie should be taken as seriously as a "state of the union" or a complex analysis of the Soviet method as Rain Man should be on the world of gambling or intricacies of autism.
If you're already someone desperate to be a proxy-depressed liberal (or conservative, same crap) waxing poetic about how badly the soviet people had it in the 1980s without ever having lived there or spoken to people who lived there and if your only "experience" of the USSR is from secondary sources with lets say an artistic license guided by a political motive, you might be tempted to buy the hilariously crappy reviews treating the movie as a masterpiece exposing deep layers of human misery encapsulated in the Soviet regime that a free thinking westerner could only imagine through the medium of cinema or literature.
Of course, as I said, if you're not the above, as in you're a normal human being, you won't read too much into this movie rather than somewhat politically filtered story about the banal nature of authority and it's abuse, something which clearly never takes place in our modern, capitalist, democratic nations.
In this aspect, the movie really provides ample opportunity for the western liberal to self-congratulate and virtue signal using the most cliched pseudo-intellectual posturing. In another one, this movie should be taken as seriously as a "state of the union" or a complex analysis of the Soviet method as Rain Man should be on the world of gambling or intricacies of autism.