Oliver Stone is one of the most important American filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s, who in the 21st century devoted himself more to documentaries and research into American history. Stone never hid his leftist views and was always critical of American imperialist policy, and this could be seen in his most famous feature films, especially the Vietnam trilogy. However, the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy is the event that clearly fascinates this tireless filmmaker, activist and researcher the most, and three decades after the feature film “JFK”, he also shot a documentary on the same event.
The official version of the events in Dallas on November 22, 1961, that Kennedy was killed by the “lone wolf” Lee Harvey Oswald, has intrigued the American public for more than six decades, and there are many who are convinced that this was not the case. This suspicion especially intensified in the nineties, after the archives were opened and everyone interested in JFK’s assassination could throw themselves into investigations. And Stone gathered in this film practically all the most important American researchers of the Kennedy assassination and the events that followed, and although Stone announced this documentary as a kind of continuation of the film “JFK”, a lot of what he reveals here, we already learned in the feature film.
And “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” was compiled from numerous archival recordings supported by documentation and interviews with all these powerful researchers while the narrators are Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Sutherland. In the foreground of the documentary is again the refutation of the findings of the Warren Commission, that is, a commission made up of congressmen, which included the former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles. And the film could be divided into two parts, and in the first part, Stone paid attention to the details of the investigation and the evidence that should show that everything surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent events was actually very suspicious.
Numerous witnesses and documents claim that nothing happened as stated in the official documents and it is quite clear that the initial investigation was very sloppy, which definitely gives the right to all those numerous conspiracy theorists and to all those who in the last sixty years have set themselves the task of discovering what really happened. In the second part of the film, Stone focuses on the theories of who could really want the death of the progressive president and how it is not impossible that the assassination of Kennedy was carefully planned for a long time. Stone openly accuses the CIA and Dulles of having the greatest interest in the assassination of Kennedy and tries to put the whole situation since Kennedy’s victory in the elections into a historical-political context and show who and how his politics could have bothered him.
Although the film is really full of numerous details, the smallest irregularities related to the investigation such as ballistics, autopsy results, witness statements that were not included in the official documents, Stone made an interesting and intriguing documentary about a topic that will surely intrigue the American public as long as it lives. And Stone performs there undisguisedly from the perspective of a man who was an admirer of Kennedy’s image and part and a man who is convinced that America and automatically the world would have been a completely different place if Kennedy had not been killed and if he had managed to implement his policies and ideas to the end. What would have happened, we will probably never know, just as we will probably never know exactly what happened on that fateful day in Dallas.