A review by rebus
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, Denton J. Tipton, Troy Little
4.5
It's rare to see anything adapted well across media, but the great book by Hunter S. Thompson has now been masterfully rendered in film and now in a graphic novel.
It's replete with many of Hunter's wisest observations, how in a closed society where all are guilty the only crime is getting caught, the final sin stupidity in a world of thieves, and the admission that journalism is neither profession nor trade but a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits. It's Hunter at his best, doing what he called 'edge work' and going with the flow of the 'great magnet' and the artist captures almost every manic moment of it as vibrantly as did the director of the film. The single flaw I found in the story is that I believe Hunter had his own big nervous breakdown during the research into the Campaign Trail '72 book, not here (or on the Hell's Angels journey as some suggest).
The soliloquy about our survival trip and how the 60s promised enlightenment for $3 a trip but left a generations of cripples with bad lifestyles unable to deal with the 'grim, meat-hook realities of life' is as affecting as in the film, as Hunter takes down the mystic fallacy that someone tends the light at the end of the tunnel (I always wonder if that was inspired by Dylan singing that death is not the end, which left the supposedly spiritual generation empty and unresolved about it, in actuality putting their energy into self improvement and exploitation rather than enlightenment, ending up exploiting the world they claimed they wanted to save; the Boomers are the biggest hypocrites in human history aside from Democrats).
It's also a dazzling tale of the drug culture and how it mirrors society, the uppers of the 60s leading to the downers of the 70s, still mostly being consumed by said Boomers, washing away the pain of their betrayal.
It's replete with many of Hunter's wisest observations, how in a closed society where all are guilty the only crime is getting caught, the final sin stupidity in a world of thieves, and the admission that journalism is neither profession nor trade but a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits. It's Hunter at his best, doing what he called 'edge work' and going with the flow of the 'great magnet' and the artist captures almost every manic moment of it as vibrantly as did the director of the film. The single flaw I found in the story is that I believe Hunter had his own big nervous breakdown during the research into the Campaign Trail '72 book, not here (or on the Hell's Angels journey as some suggest).
The soliloquy about our survival trip and how the 60s promised enlightenment for $3 a trip but left a generations of cripples with bad lifestyles unable to deal with the 'grim, meat-hook realities of life' is as affecting as in the film, as Hunter takes down the mystic fallacy that someone tends the light at the end of the tunnel (I always wonder if that was inspired by Dylan singing that death is not the end, which left the supposedly spiritual generation empty and unresolved about it, in actuality putting their energy into self improvement and exploitation rather than enlightenment, ending up exploiting the world they claimed they wanted to save; the Boomers are the biggest hypocrites in human history aside from Democrats).
It's also a dazzling tale of the drug culture and how it mirrors society, the uppers of the 60s leading to the downers of the 70s, still mostly being consumed by said Boomers, washing away the pain of their betrayal.