Why so much hype?

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) tells Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) that his piece on the Lombok famine was melodramatic. She adds, "It's only my opinion. My flatmate was moved to tears..." I loved Guy's reply, "What does it take to bring you to tears, eh?" Greet tension simmering between them.I saw this movie when it first came out and it blew me away. I just watched it again after 35 tears and I'm so glad to see it has held up well. Great storytelling on many levels. Excellent performances all around, including a great supporting cast. Thank you TCM for airing this during the 31 Days of Oscar (2018)!

Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously is now an Australian classic and, along with the likes of Panic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, helped establish Weir as a film-maker to watch our for and eased his inevitable transition to Hollywood. Living Dangerously may now be a more obviously flawed film in 2017 than it was back in '82, but it still retains a sense of raw power stemming from an uncanny sense of place and danger. The setting is Indonesia, 1965, and President Sukarno's grasp on power is quickly fading. It's the eve of his overthrowing by the military and the communist purge that quickly followed, and journalists in Jakarta huddle in sweaty bars, feeding on scraps thrown to them by Sukarno, knocking back beers and chasing tail to pass the time.The last guy left in a hurry, so young Australian foreign correspondent Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) arrives in Jakarta without a single informant or friend to lean on. The diplomats and fellow journalists who inhabit the same bar every night take no pity on him, but sympathetic Chinese-Australian dwarf named Billy Kwan sees something in the handsome, chain-smoking young man and decides to help him. Kwan believes strongly in Sukarno, the President his own people has dubbed the 'Puppet Master' due to his ability to keep the peace between the Communist Party and the military, and that he will save his poverty-stricken people from starvation. As well as setting up a key interview for the young journalist, he also introduces Hamilton to Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), a beautiful assistant working for the British embassy. As the conflict heats up and the stories become juicier and more perilous, Hamilton must choose between his job, his lover and his close friend.The flaws of The Year of Living Dangerously are more apparent now, 35 years after its release, as the idea of cinema's tendency to 'whitewash' is now more openly discussed. It becomes clear very quickly that the most interesting character in the film is Billy Kwan. He has a much more personal attachment to the events playing out, and proves a more charismatic screen presence than Gibson's blander outsider. He is also played astonishingly well by Linda Hunt, the only actor to win an Academy Award for the playing a character of the opposite sex. When Kwan retreats into the background around the half-way mark, the focus shifts to the blossoming romance between Hamilton and Bryant, and the film becomes far less interesting in the process. However, there are some terrific individual scenes. The initial excitement of shooting a violent protest quickly gets out of hand, and a horrifyingly tense slow-drive through a heavily-armed road-block will leave you holding your breath. Yet it's difficult to shake the feeling that Weir's movie would have been far more absorbing with Kwan as the driving force at its centre.

There are few modern directors I admire as much as Peter Weir. His movies have a lean, elegant quality; he knows restraint and the power of understatement. His use of music is masterful. He is a fantastic actors' director, getting from people like Harrison Ford and Jim Carrey the best performances of their careers - here it's Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. Even potential miscalculations - like giving the part of an Indonesian man to an American actress, as it happens with Linda Hunt in this film - strike gold: Hunt won a deserved Academy Award for the role.Even a minor Weir, like The Year of Living Dangerously, captures the sense of alienation - and exhilaration - of outsiders lost in mysterious places, a recurrent theme in the director's opus (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander). Here it's Indonesia during the Sixties, as Gibson's foreign correspondent follows the attempted coup to overthrow President Sukarno.Worth watching, like every movie in Weir's filmography.7/10

Peter Weir directed this account of the Indonesian revolution of 1965, which sees inexperienced Australian foreign correspondent Guy Hamilton(played by Mel Gibson) covering this story, with the help of a dwarf photographer(played by Linda Hunt, who won a best supporting actress Academy Award playing a man!) who has come to care deeply about the country, though will feel betrayed by its outcome. Sigourney Weaver plays an embassy aide who becomes romantically involved with Guy, who also helps him with the story, though events will spiral out-of-control, endangering all their lives... Moderately interesting film has solid performances, though the story is unfocused, and only sporadically powerful. Still, mostly worthwhile.