Okay, wow. This is definitely one of those movies where my “what I thought it was about” preconception and “what it’s actually about” reality are totally different.

So going in, obviously I’ve seen a zillion times that famous “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” line, right. We all have, it’s on like every Oscar clip and whatever. And so the presumption is that this is a movie where the hero is a brave truth teller who calls out the hypocrisy in American society and blah blah yadda yadda. It felt like it was set up to be the kind of movie whose entire two hours you could predict from that thirty second clip. We settled in to watch it with a sense of grim determination, ready for yet another terrible “of its time” movie.

But boy howdy, that is not what it is at all. Because what those clips don’t make clear is that the “mad as hell” rallying cry is being given by a mentally unstable man used cynically by money-hungry network executives who want to cash in on ambient free-floating anger. They don’t give a fuck if people are angry or not, they just know that this very mentally ill dude who’s giving these jeremiads about being angry is super-popular, and is making them money, and as long as his screeds are pulling in the audiences, they’re totally cool with it no matter what he says. They’ll even sign up terrorists and Communists if that’s where the cash is.

It’s not quite “Fox News: The Early Days” but it’s also not not that. When they’re initially surprised that an angry, raging anchor can find an audience, it’s hard not to think that this might have been shocking in the ’70s but is basically Tucker Carlson every night nowadays.

There are things here that maybe don’t work quite as well as they did back in the day (having the single female executive be a heartless mercenary who sleeps with another guy and lures him away from his wife is kinda yikes), but fundamentally this is a lot more relevant than I thought it would be, and than I wish it were. The Paddy Chayefsky screenplay is maybe heavy on righteous monologues, but still searing 45 years later.

Whatever you think of the AFI list (my wife was like: “I’m surprised this is on the AFI list, it seems too good”), this one is solid. Recommended, to my surprise.