It is movies like these that remind what a great filmmaker we lost when OLiver Stone went down the JFK rabbit hole over the past few years.
His work between 1986 and 1995 is some of the best films that any movie maker has ever done. Platoon and Born on The Fourth of July are unquestioned masteprices, Wall Street was a film that society completely misunderstood and films he did such as Talk Radio and Salvador are brilliant black comedies. Natural bORN killers was another misunderstood project and I have a genuine respect for Nixon that is not held by the majority of critics.
JFK, however, marks the turn in Stone from filmmaker to part of the conspiracy narrative. It is pure propaganda with no coherent plot or storyline and I think those who considered it a masterpiece at the time were basing it more on their own feelings than anything Stone said. There was heavy political backlash at the time, particularly from the New York Times, historians and politicians. There's an argument that JFK was one of the factors that led to so much of the conspiracy discussion that became mainstream during the 1990s and proliferates to this day. 30 years after JFK and sixty years after the assassination there is still no evidence of a broader conspiracy or that Oswald acted alone. Yet Stone continues to double down on this fact, his most recent film was Through the Looking Glass which looked at it 60 years. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland who played 'X' in the original film. X, for the record, was Fletcher Prouty a conspiracy theorist whose main book argued LBJ had killed JFK. There has never been any evidence to prove this but Stone has essentially made his beliefs part of popular culture - and while he was better in Nixon, he still made an allusion to it there.
Over the last decade Stone has devoted his life more towards documentaries that are essentially propaganda then they are any real depiction of events, along with the constant interview of dictators like Vladimir Putin. He hasn't made an original movie since Snowden and there doesn't seem to be a sign he's going back to it soon. This is a tragedy because he was a great filmmaker and we've lost him - in a sense - to the same kind of propaganda he spent so much time railing against in Killers. Ir'a a different kind of propaganda, but its still propagana