ok, first off, josh brolin is amazing. if it wasnt for him, this movie would have been borderline terrible.
as it is, it is a very myopic biography of the man. it glosses over lots of important events and people in order to get to what oliver stone wants to deal with, namely his relationship with his father and its relation to the iraq war.
there are whole passages of dialogue that are utterly unbelievable, but i understand the need for some of it, because he doesnt have time to go all the way into anything, he has to compress immense amounts of information and emotions in a single scene.
those expecting an out and out character assassination are going to be disappointed, because this is an attempt to humanize a president that has been consistently dehumanized for awhile now. he does however pick out several key public and publicized moments to recreate, none of which are flattering, some of which are surprisingly bad looking, especially the mission accomplished speech.
the supporting cast is all over the place. condoleezza rice’s portrayal is almost racist in her yassiryassir parroting of bush, while colin powell is the sole, lonely, brave voice of reason on the cabinet. cheney is pretty much war-crazed and evil, tenet is bumbling, basically its just a justification of how we have stereotyped these people in the public mind. which is fine, the movie isnt called cheney, its called w, and so the main revelations in this movie are centered on his character.
in the end, this is oliver stone trying to show the world his impression of george w. bush, and backing it up with some good acting and a few of our favorite bushisms. while it is entertaining, it is no more than one man’s opinion, so just take it at that.

Oliver Stone takes on W. George W. Bush. He pulls a few punches in this doc-drama about W’s life and rise to power. Namely I wanted to see things about his involvement in Skull and Bones during his Yale years. Both his father, George H. W. Bush and Grandfather, Prescott Bush, were members of Skull and Bones before during their Yale years as well. W only goes into his alcohol abuse and doesn’t touch any of his other drug problems. I also thought it could have used a few more Bushisms. W does go into some of his failures, but it doesn’t cover the Bush family ties to Oil and the Arabs. Olive Stone let me down on the sinister side of the Bushes I wanted to see.

George W. Bush starts off as a drunken college frat boy, his many failures (but not all of them), and helping his father win his run for the White House. He later goes on to run for Governor of Texas.

George W. Bush is jealous of his younger brother Jeb. It turns out he gets his bad temper from his innocent looking mother Barbara Bush, while Jeb Bush takes more after his father. GW has an acceptance issue with his distant father.

W shows George W Bush for the drunken idiot buffoon that he is. W has some funny true to history shots in it. I like the one that had of Karl Rove playing with his Blackberry. Product placements for Dr Pepper and Aquafina are in W.

There are a few low points in the movie, it showed W visiting the injured troops. W shows the low point of George W. Bush’s father losing his bid for reelection despite the fact that Desert Storm was a very quick and easy success. Olive Stone’s W does show the mistake that George H. W. Bush made, not going all the way to Baghdad and get Saddam the first go around. The saddest part is that George H. W. Bush is more upset about his son ruining the Bush family name than he is about W ruining the country.

W. – Worth Consuming 2008