YMMV / The Parallax View

• Adaptation Displacement: This was actually based on a novel (by Loren Singer) that was more explicitly tied to Who Shot JFK?.
• Awesome Music: Michael Small's score has a ton of highlights, including the eerie main theme of the film, the action remix of said theme when Frady gets in a car chase with the Salmontail Police Department, and the surrealistic, intense music that plays during the famous Blipvert scene.
• Funny Moments:
  • During the rehearsal for Hammond's televised address, a tuba player is shown repeatedly blundering his cues and utterly failing at playing the tuba.
  • In a moment of Black Comedy, after Hammond is shot, his golf cart veers out of control and crashes into various tables as his pre-recorded speech continues to blather on.
  • Frady's meeting with Turner is filled with funny moments, thanks to Hunter's snarkiness.
    • Turner is introduced complaining about how, not only has he been fired from the FBI, but he's had his name taken off the list of ex-FBI Agents.
    • Then they start trying to forge Frady's alias for infiltrating the Parallax Corporatiom.
      Frady: I need you to make me look anti-social, like someone who's got a big problem with authority.
      Turner: Well, that shouldn't be too hard.
    • Turner states that Frady's alias should use an alias to cover something up, so that the company won't look too hard into the second alias. The two then brainstorm what the alias should be covering up.
      Turner: I know! Let's make him a weenie wagger!
      Frady: A weenie wagger?
      Turner: You got a better idea?
• Nightmare Fuel: During the Blipvert, various images are shown in association with words ("Home" and a farmstead, for example). As it continues the associations get more twisted, most notably when showing a picture previously under "Mother" with "Lover." And it only gets worse from there.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Kenneth Mars as the ex-FBI agent is pretty memorable for his hilarious snarkiness and Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic with Frady.
  • Anthony Zerbe shows up uncredited to play the eccentric professor Frady goes to to help him fake his Parallax questionnaire. It's pretty hard to forget a guy who plays video games with a chimpanzee and starts rattling off about how a chimpanzee bit off his colleague's ear.
• Signature Scene: The Blipvert Frady is shown during his test by the Parallax Corporation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Will Hunter. He's a cynical former FBI agent who has a great Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic with Frady and potential insight into the conspiracy, yet he only appears in a single scene and is never mentioned again.
• Unintentional Period Piece: No one is able to buy a plane ticket on the plane anymore, and there's no way a bomb could be put aboard the plane without going through all kinds of security detectors. (Although that's only a hindrance for the public: if an organisation as influential as Parallax wants it done, they can easily exert authority over the people who control security in order to get it through.)
• Vindicated by History: When the film initially came out, it received mixed-to-bad reviews, with many critics seeing it as being about the same as, or only slightly better than, Executive Action. Nowadays, it's considered one of the best paranoid thrillers ever made.

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