Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers

★★★★★ Watched 29 Nov 2022

What starts as a visually stunning but putrid and bizzarre deep dive into American media Mandela effects then distills into a succinct commentary on the nature of power, hegemony, good and evil- and what’s in between. Gory and sexy, thrilling and fun but sobering. When it closes out you can’t help but identify with the crazed murderers- you feel that somehow what they’re doing is not so bad. Not compared to the crooked cops, media mavens and wrathful wardens. The treatment of women here is also interesting. Laden with abuse, assault, fetishistic scopophilia, and torture porn- we still manage to find feminism if you know how to look for it right. Though the lens runs over these scenes objectively, the viewer must see themselves as the victimized woman, and be disgusted and angered by what is happening to her- to feel monstrous about watching it happen and understand the plight of why such women want revenge. Set against the wide open spaces of the ever-psychedelic southwest, with big red cars and southern drawls this tinges on the fever dream of the frontier west. A 5/5 for me.