Why not?

Rating: 9/10 (23 November 2008)

This is my second favorite movie right next to "The Green Mile". Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison fought for what they thought was justice and Stone made a great movie about it. The beginning is one of the best in cinematic history.
Don't take every word of the movie for fact, of course (O'Keefe and Mr.X are composite characters, final speech never happened, Camp street/Lafayette street thing also not above doubt). But as far as theories about the Kennedy assassination go, it's the one that I think makes the most sense.
The guys who (according to Stone) killed Kennedy will never be tried. They are;
1; Probably dead by now.
2; Probably above the law.
Stone condemned them in front of History, which is all we can do.
Why couldn't Kennedy have been killed by a conspiracy? Why not? Ever read Machiavelli? They are no ethics in politics. We hold as fact that Julius Caesar (along with a whole bunch of roman emperors) died as a result of political intrigue. Catherine the Great murdered her own husband to get power. Her grandson Alexander the first murdered his own father and Peter the Great killed his own son. Archeologists now think king Tut and Raamses III might have been murdered by members of their court. Not even the popes and Tibetan monks were above that sort of thing! Why couldn't it happen in 1960's United States? Democracy? I'm sorry to say this, but the only difference between democracy and dictature in that matter is how many people you have to fool in order to gain power. The difference is that this time, we're the ones being fooled, pretty hard to consider! We tend to have blind faith in our government (whatever country is the one we call ours). If they don't protect us (especially in war time or in a tensed international situation), who will? Stone's great merit was to make us doubt. Remind us to never leave our brains at the door. At the end of his monologue, Costner seems to break the fourth wall and speak to us as he says: "It's up to you".
In the end, I say everyone has the right to disagree with me, Stone or with any other "fried conspiracy theorists" (that, by the way, are also citizens, even the ones believing in UFO stuff) but those who compare this movie to "Birth of a Nation" (a movie that pratically resurrected the KKK) or to Riefenstal's work show extremely bad taste, underestimate the negative impact those movies had and are insulting more their own intelligence than Stone's work.