ORWELL: 2+2=5 - Mark Reviews Movies

Orwell: 2+2=5, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2025

People of sound mind take George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning. Too many in power throughout the world, though, seem to use the 1949 novel as a playbook. With Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck connects the author's anti-totalitarian beliefs, communicated through the allegory of his fiction and his more direct writings, to a modern age that appears to be on the cusp of allowing authoritarianism to flourish—if we haven't already slid down that path too far.

Being reminded of the specifics of Orwell's final novel, which was published less than a year before his death, is bleakly illuminating at this particular moment, and Peck's documentary only reaches about halfway through 2024 in terms of the real-world connections it makes. If the filmmaker had waited a few months, he'd probably be in the editing room still, waiting for whatever breaking news he would be able to add to the final cut each day.

The film we do get, however, remains potent and urgent, as if Peck has heeded and channeled Orwell's own passion against totalitarianism into the director's own warning for the here and now. Going through the final years of Orwell's life, as he recounts his biography and pronounces his political philosophy in letters and diaries, also pushes an air of despair to the material. As tuberculosis overwhelms the author's body in the documentary's biographical narrative, the modern world itself starts to look diseased, as well. Only time will tell if we will regain the freedom to breathe easily again or if the current political climate is just an extended death rattle.

One almost gets the sense that Orwell could predict the future here, although that requires too sunny a view of humanity and history to really believe. The biographical elements here have Orwell, voiced by Damian Lewis, describing his childhood in colonial India, his personal revelations of the effects of imperialism and the peculiarities of class, his own fights again fascism in Spain and against Nazi Germany, and his time on the Scottish island of Jura, where he would write Nineteen Eighty-Four with some uncertainty that he would actually get the story right.

Much of the biography, of course, serves to explain the underlying conceit and themes of that novel, since Orwell lived to witness the violence of the British Empire in India (participating in it, much to his regret, as a young police officer there), the civil war in Spain, the horrors of the Nazis, and the various disinformation campaigns within the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. His own politics, as he says briefly here, are of a democratic socialist bent, but as authoritarianism rises and falls and rises again throughout his life, Orwell's most prevailing works are the ones in which he lays out what he was against, instead of for what he stood.

Peck's more modern narrative in the documentary follows the three contradictory tenets of Big Brother's government: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." That first one has too many examples from which the filmmaker could pull, but the focus on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as leaders on the other side put their own "doublethink" and "Newspeak" to describe what's happening, makes the point clear. Peck goes back as far as World War II, really, to raise the specter of euphemistic descriptions of death and destruction—phrases as now commonly accepted as "collateral damage" and "special military operation."

The second example is more complex and diverse, as Peck brings to the fore economic disparity, in which the wealthy become richer over the decades and everyone else's average financial situation stays a straight line on a chart, and the growing surveillance state. It's not just governments, either, that are addressed, such as China's system of a "social credit score" aided by cameras and advanced identification technology. Much of this we have brought upon ourselves, by buying into social media and tech companies that profit from personal information, freely given by their customers. Orwell understood the government overreach as, perhaps, inevitable. There was surely no way he might have imagined the second part, but regardless, it's equally as relevant.

The final of Big Brother's core ideas might be the most pertinent, although Peck, as much a historian and disseminator of information as he is a filmmaker, surely cares about it personally. "Ignorance" is both a strategy of totalitarians and the unfortunate state of the news media when it comes to information.

Here, that takes the form of documenting attacks on journalists and whistleblowers, while also showing how more politically friendly media outlets cover those in power and how the powerful intentionally sow disinformation to rally their supporters. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, people followed Big Brother largely on account of an entire propaganda machine that existed for the population's entire lifetime. Seeing people put, as one of the experts in some archival footage calls it, an almost "divine" infallibility upon a current, constantly lying politician is even more disheartening.

It seems strange to suggest that Orwell might have been somewhat naïve in his depiction of, perhaps, the most famous totalitarian state in all of fiction, but Orwell: 2+2=5 almost makes that case. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four was one populated by sinister actors and those who had belief in those people and system instilled in them since birth. It was a terrifying vision of the future. The present we're currently in, however, is one many chose for themselves. Does that make Orwell's warning pertinent or irrelevant? Let's hope there's still hope it's the former.

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