Viewer456 I really wanted to like this documentary but it frequently tried my patience throughout its bloated running time. Curtis takes an important topic (the oversimplification of the Afghanistan conflict by western media and politicians) and makes an absolute hash of engaging the viewer.In trying to go for atmosphere over narrative Mr Curtis has given us a film peppered with beautiful, horrific and funny individual moments that seem to have no place in the narrative. They seem to be there because they tickle Curtis in some way. Which is fine in a the sense that this is listed as an experimental documentary, but one can't help feeling there are strands that should have been bulked up. The British officer talking about how the Uk military on the ground had completely misidentified their enemy and were being used as pawns by local tribes - more of this please.The soldier delighting in being able to have a bird sit on his helmet? Lovely, but not really worth the indulgent screen-time Curtis gives it. There are numerous other examples of flabby editing throughout the piece.I think we can call this experiment an ambitious failure.

ellenjoelle Even for an avid documentary lover this film manages to take the interest out of one of the most relevant topics of our time. I tried watching it twice but abandoned it 1.5h into the spectacle both times, because it was just annoyingly biased, simplistic content with a lot of predictable art school type 'look at my meaningful composition of clips' faffing. Incredibly hard to follow rambling type of story telling that does nothing to keep and peak the viewers attention at reasonable intervals.However, I guess it is noteworthy that at least someone is pushing the boundaries of narration and film making here.

peterogers2 People are immobilised mentally by gratefully clinging to the more glorious story of our attempts to rid the world of evil, to the extent that, as a result, they are no longer able to construct a sensible equation between what is being achieved and the suffering of others. We have become like the Germans were, over which we scoffed and carped and declared our moral superiority for decades, offering, as they did, nothing but adulation for the glorious troops and dismissing the treacherous thought that evil was being done. This is an important historical document confronts us under the pure rules of reason with an intervention by the British Crown in Helmand which was both a terrible and an act of profound evil because despite being told in no uncertain terms that they were about to attack a host of innocent people trying to resist the corrupt local government, we dropped bombs on them thereby turning appalling injustice into a catastrophe for the innocent by an act of supreme evil. The great point illustrated here, which no-one is really picking up, is that the mainstream news never told the country about this possibility, only of our honour and bravery and sacrifice in pursuing the Taliban, which turns out to be dishonest and unbalanced reporting, acting for the state, not the honour of the Press and Media. We can from these brave revelations that if something is not done then Big Brother and The Ministry of Truth will have got its way and vanquished our national sense of fair play and humanity. It is deeply worrying to our democracy and the plurality required of the Mass media that the BBC has prevented this programme from general release and that it will soon be lost to us because DVD's are not possible as things stand and it will be removed from its only source, iPlayer, worryingly for free speech the film has already been stopped on YouTube, what does that say? Adam Curtis has tried everything here to get through our complacency and to awaken us to what is really happening, and it is time that we told our leaders that they must stop and that an independent Judicial Enquiry over which the Government and Crown have no control be undertaken to root out those who commit these awful crimes in our names whilst skulking behind doors of secrecy. It shows that our democracy is a fraud as no-one would have wanted any of this in their name.

rettercritical This film marks a new era in online content from both one of the worlds great broadcasters and filmmakers. Rather than be constrained by the formats of television and convention of breaking things up into mini-series (Curtis has already made several of such landmarks), Adam Curtis has been given the freedom to make a lengthy, challenging feature documentary that has gone straight to BBC iplayer.The result is a departure from his usual heavily-narrated work to a much more impressionistic piece of cinema that uses the metaphor of SOLARIS for the incomprehensible Afghanistan and related middle east conflicts. Raw footage is able to speak for itself. Typically cutting-room-floor material, such as shaky re-framing between shots is used to express something of complexity, like reading between the lines. The BBC's job is to be relevant and provide what the market is unable to do. Here, the BBC triumphs, Curtis having the shackles taken off has delivered a giant canvas of grey with various drip patterns, which is the perpetual mess of foreign intervention in Afghanistan and western policy in the middle east. The closer you get, the more complicated it is.Labor, Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans all get a hiding in the cyclical mess, which is examined via the extensive BBC archives to Which Curtis was given full access to. Some highlights include:Art teachers sent from England to the Afghan war effort to educate Afghanis about Marcel Duchamp and the early Avant-Garde. British "supermarket" for high-tech weaponry, set out like a luxury department store of big-toys whose customers are wealthy Gulf states. In Thatcher-era Britain, this was one of the most thriving industries. Highly recommended. This marks a new era because instead of bite-sized webisodes, this is a very serious piece of long-form filmmaking being made exclusively for what must become the main platform for public broadcasters world wide (online content). Though counterintuitive to what we perceive online content to be like, work like this is vital both in-itself but for breaking new ground and showing us what is possible with the relatively new platform/medium. Mike Retter