W.

An interesting, if somewhat blinked view on one of the most controversial presidents that the USA has seen. I too was a little perplexed that the film concentrated solely on the Iraq war for the segments set during his presidency, but I realised that Oliver Stone was not trying to make a documentary. There are plenty of those about Bush Jr. already. Stone is trying to show the man behind the presidency.

I really really hope that the characters of Cheney and Rumsfeld are exaggerated, because if they're like that in real life, then the world is a far scarier place than I thought it was. Cheney is portrayed as some kind of sinister puppet master, pulling at W's strings, and Rumsfeld comes across as someone you'd normally see in a straight jacket.

Probably the most disturbing part is when the group are in the situation room and discussing the invasion of Iraq. Colin Powell's desperate attempts to bring some kind of sanity to the situation, repeatedly pointing out that Bin Laden is hiding in a cave in Pakistan somewhere, and being told by Dick Cheney that the American people want revenge for 9/11 and don't particularly care if Iraq was involved or not.

The special features are well worth a look. They too are shorter than I'd have liked, but are very interesting, especially the section about how many believe that Bush nearly broke the American government system by assigning too much power to the executive branch. There's not too much about the breakdown of intelligent gathering that lead to the invasion, except to say that it is incredulous that the US military would defer to a report from British intelligence, which came from a single source, rather than their own intel gathering network which was actually contradicting that report.