Brilliant

Not everyone knows, trust me I worked in advertising, and everyone in the business feels like they are creative geniuses who are bringing so much good in the world, instead of what they really are: Lenins who are brainwashing people into living like robots for desires and wants they don't usually have, which make them forget real life, the things that are meaningful. I think the blank space in the end where there were no more billboards, was absolutely liberating. With all the crap I see in my city, all the idiocy of meaningless information that bombards us all with information we don't need so we can buy more crap we don't need is exhausting. But everyone I talk to about this, just says so what, I don't see the problem. I think the film explore the fact, that there is a problem, only that we are robotized way too much to see it. God forbit we live without the new iPhone.

I agree with you about the epiphany. I do see also some sort of shift in humanity's love affair with consumerism. The problem is that a very little minority as usual has seen this huge problem that we're facing with our species. There were always mind games with humanity to make us programmed to something, but today it's more dangerous because the methods are much more advanced. Basically there are actual psychologists, and neuroscientists who know much better today than yesterday how our brains work, and how to use this information to program us into wanting their brands. And the science is not that difficult either. It's just so simple if you break it down, because unfortunately we as a species, are very easy to program. On the other hand I love how the film is set in Russia too, not only because we are able to see the consumerism and advertising in a post communist country (and I know how that feels like since I was born in the years where my own country transformed and because from a communist country where you had to stand in line to buy butter portioned by the government, to the moment where we worshipped coca cola and we used the first bottles as decorative pieces in our house - this was in the beginning of the 90s), but also because of the use of Lenin in being the first to create marketing - as Misha says. Lenin did absolutely that, he used propaganda, just like many other fascists and capitalists did to program people into accepting a new reality, shifting their behavior into wanting something and accepting something, and being uncapable of separating with something that ultimately would be harmful to them (I'd be as generous to say that marketing is much more ancient and was used by the first Egyptian kings and semi-gods)
And I have studied Communications, and the notion of propaganda, and using methods, and language into shifting people's behavior and attitude into products and ideas. And I have worked for two years in advertising. I didn't need more than two years to understand how much of a disgusting job we do with shifting people's behavior and attitude into things that, and we think that' art.

That's not freaking art, it's mind games. And the worst part about advertising and branding is not the deifying of the burger, the coca cola, the Apple products (and all of these are pretty aweful, especially knowing how they are shaping third world countries, using their labor - bet America and the civilised west never think about that), but branding is used for politicians nowadays, who are basically prepackaged by lobbying companies who shift their corporate related policies and make the world happen as they wish. So not only they program us, but they make us think it was our own idea.

What I love about the film is how Abby - the voice of the programmed population that doesn't know the truth - is saying so what, so what if they are making us want to buy their brands, what's the problem with that. We are basically experiencing at this moment the part of the population that has woken up from the Matrix and is really appalled at how we've been used by corporations, and those who haven't been woken up yet, but say so what to the idea of being used, they don't actually comprehend the dangers of it.

Yes propaganda, and ultimately persuasion, is much more ancient than advertising, and much more ancient than Lenin, or Hitler. The problem is that it has become so professional and reckless into effortlessly brainwashing masses into believing they are walking in a heavenly resort while blindly thei are walking into the line of fire. Persuasion is absolutely one of the most ancient human's traits into getting what one wants from others, but it is just so genial and scientific into doing it today, that has become so very dangerous. The dangers are the fact that because of how blind the media has made us to things like Climate change, dangerous wars, poverty and starvation in third world countries, wage-slavery in places like China etc., and so many more dangers that are bigger to humans and our earth than they ever were. The film was very metaphoric and it didn't needs to be constant in its story telling, or even literal. Every point of the film was prominent into telling the progress of our society into this information-persuasion overly-packaged world, and with a very cathartic image of a billboardless town, giving also the idea of a brain much more free to create its own desires, its own wants, much more free to truly think.

I think the message was said clearly in the movie and it's not that at all.

It wasn't necessarily about capitalism nor socialism. It is questioning who we are, really. It's saying that people haven't developed their own tastes of anything. I read in an interview that part of the inspiration for some of the events was one of the writer's own son. He always wanted to go to McDonald's because they had a toy he'd seen advertised. He didn't like the food. But after a couple of years of making him eat the food because he spent money to give the kid the toy he wanted, he began liking the food. Would his kid have grown to like McDonald's some other way? It's possible but the likelihood, depending on the food normally served to the child by the writer, would be low. So the movie is asking are we really us at all? What ideas are our own and what ideas are the biproduct of mass advertisement? Why do we like certain things?

To quote Fight Club "Things you own end up owning you." That's more or less what the movie was about, not the evils of corporate greed. That's just a symptom of what's going on in the movie.

There's also hints of Illuminati as well (bathing in ashes of the Red Heifer) to see things others can't is a Hebrew myth/legend/religious reference.

So, again, it's not so much about the surface, it's more or less asking questions about what that surface hides underneath. It's not trying to be revelation at all, it's asking you to have a revelation of yourself.

This is one of those movies that frustrates me, thinking, why doesn't everyone care. Why do people dismiss the reality in which we live in. I empathize with Misha after the red cow sacrifice. He can see things others can't and doesn't know how to convey how important his findings are.