So earlier this week I couldn’t sleep, so I read email and watched the movie Brazil. I didn’t know much about the movie before seeing it, other then it being an Orwellian look at the future and was considered to be a really good movie.

Brazil didn’t disappoint. The special effects were that of an art student film, but visually stunning never the less. What I found most interesting was how many parallels I found in todays world with the film. Clearly there is some strong social/political commentary in Brazil, specifically dealing with how the government’s use of information and of media leads to controlling it’s citizens. Additionally how people are easily manipulated with consumerism.

One of the tightest parallels however in my mind was how the gov’t in Brazil used the “Ministry of Information” and classified laws and regulations to not only keep secrets from people, but used that information against it’s own citizens- often with horrible consequences. This sounds very much like our “do not fly lists” which ordinary citizens can’t view and have no means of clearing their names off of, secret TSA regulations and the federal governments attempt at creating a large databases covering many aspects of law abiding citizens in order to ferret out possible terrorists (interestingly, the exact same reason used in Brazil) is almost too creepy.