Neal Fox repeatedly missed golden opportunities
by Martin Hafer
When I recently went to a film festival, one of the films I missed was Neal Fox’s The Conspiracy Project and I wasn’t at all happy that another movie I wanted to see was being shown at the exact same time. After all, the advertisement for The Conspiracy Project looked funny–with a Jib Jab style chorus line of politicians dancing about on the poster. So, I made sure to get a copy of the film…and a very strange and irritating experience it was. Instead of a documentary in the traditional sense, the film is actually a long string of music videos about a wide, wide variety of conspiracy theories. Unique it is, but it’s also a case where the film had a chance to seriously address some very important issues and blew it.
While Neal Fox’s words and music actually were amazingly good and the film often slickly made, this music was also so loud that often you couldn’t hear the news clips that were playing at the same time. Using closed captions might have helped a bit but the sound mix of the videos was just awful. So even if I agreed with all these paranoid conspiracies and liked the style of the film, it would have been a frustrating viewing experience. Plus, I cannot believe that most viewers would like 86 minutes of this.
The other frustration is that every possible conspiracy theory appears in the film…you name it, it’s got it. At first, I found myself agreeing with some of these things. But then I noticed that in addition to real legitimate concerns (such as the use of drones and recent militarization of the police), all sorts of seemingly unrelated and bizarre conspiracies were tossed into the film–such as the evils of vaccines, the old Trilateral Commission and Illuminati conspiracies, one world governments, 9/11 being staged, the assassination plot involving JFK, fluoride in our water, putting tracking chips in our children, hidden plans to kill people to end overpopulation, banks and just about everything else we could imagine. Had the film taken on one issue and kept its focus narrower and documented this better, it could be taken more seriously. Instead, it just seemed a bit nutty–which is really a shame as some of the topics Fox brings up are super-important and would make great topics for future films.
Grade: D
