Adam Curtis's new documentary Bitter Lake, just released on iPlayer, explores what went wrong for the west in Afghanistan. Drawing on a vast array of archival footage, Curtis traces events back to a meeting between US President Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia in 1945, and goes on to examine the west's increasingly murky dealings with the middle east.
The story takes in America, Saudi Arabia, Britain and the Soviet Union, the rise of Wahhabism, Bin Laden and 9/11, and Islamic State – and suggests that the west's thirst for oil has helped fuel the rise of radical Islam today. So is it any good, and if it is, why isn't it on TV?
Sam Wollaston in The Guardian says Bitter Lake is "a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve". Wollaston praises the documentary for being "distinctive, genuinely different" and also "worrying, beautiful, funny, ambitious, serious, gripping and very possibly important".
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Wollaston says it's available only on BBC's iPlayer, "because that means it doesn't have to fit in with tedious constraints like schedules (it's two hours 18 minutes long) or conventional ideas about what television should look like".
Jasper Rees in the Daily Telegraph is not so sure. "Curtis's latest über-polemic on the colliding forces of 20th-century history has been confined to the iPlayer, where his apocalyptic world view would seem to be only semi-endorsed by the BBC," says Rees. "After two and a quarter hours, you can see why."
Rees says Bitter Lake is "visually astonishing" but he criticises Curtis's "tub-thumping determinism". In the end, "the egotism and grandiloquence are maddeningly at odds with the sustained brilliance of the spectacle".
Yes, Curtis has been chastised for his avowed left-wing politics, agrees David Pollack in The List, and Bitter Lake is bound to be controversial. "There's an uncomfortable truth that the characters and situations don't chime with the history we were taught in school in many cases because they were so important that they had to stay clear of the public eye."
But while some will always question Curtis's impartiality, says Pollack, there's also "a certain type of audience out there for whom Adam Curtis's familiar, destabilising form of documentary narrative is like crack".
There's a reason for that, says Jon Ronson on Vice. Bitter Lake is experimental, disturbing and too long to be on TV, but it's also Curtis's best film, says Ronson. "I think with this film, he's invented a whole new way of telling a nonfiction story."
Bitter Lake is now available on BBC iPlayer.
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