All the President’s Men, the classic 1976 movie, looks very different today. The story about political corruption is the same, but in the political climate of 2023, all the players have switched sides. Rather than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as famed journalistic heroes, it’s now the press who are the bad guys. They fell hard for the Russia collusion hoax, defending it even after it was destroyed by multiple analyses, including the recent Durham report .

But the film was so brilliantly made that there is a timelessness to it that strangely puts it beyond politics. All the President’s Men can be viewed to be as much about good and evil, light and darkness, than any specific political problem. One can even reach back to the Founding Fathers for its primary lesson: Men are not angels. They never were and never will be.

All the President’s Men is also a warning about the intelligence agencies and law enforcement groups, such as the FBI, that worked with the president of the United States to torpedo the political opposition. Today, rather than a devious Republican president being protected by a criminal intelligence community, the story arc of the 1976 film, we have a Democratic president being protected by the intelligence community. Indeed, the Durham report is so shocking because it reveals that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and media were all pushing a fake story in the service of a political party, the Democrats.

In the movie, two journalists, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post, risk their lives and dig through files to uncover a nest of criminality that leads to the White House. “Everybody is in on it” — that’s the hard reality spelled out by an informant to Woodward in the film. Nixon’s advisers, the campaign, the intelligence agencies — everyone was willing to break the law to destroy the Democrats. They used spying, opposition research, and stolen medical files to destroy the Left.

In 2016 and 2020, it was the Left doing what Nixon’s flunkies once did. Russiagate, as Durham reported, was based on opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton. Fittingly enough, a young Hillary Clinton was a low-level attorney working for the Watergate lawyers.

And then there’s the Twitter Files, with its intersection of governmental bureaucracy and high-tech companies conspiring to censor thought they don't approve of. They also squashed reports about the Hunter Biden laptop, which more than 50 former and current intelligence officials falsely said was fake.

Most of this is spelled out in Byron York’s terrific book Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment's Never-Ending War on Trump. York and the Tablet’s Jacob Siegel have revealed the corruption in the media and government the way Woodard and Bernstein did. America’s ruling party today “is run by the most untalented and incompetent people ever assembled in the country’s history,” Siegel said in a recent interview . This is a direct echo of what Mark Felt, Woodward’s source for many Watergate stories, said about Nixon’s handlers: “The truth is these are not very bright people.”

A newly published analysis of All the President’s Men by the British Film Institute convincingly argued that the film is both a time capsule and a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that transcends its time. In BFI Film Classics: All the President’s Men , authors and film scholars Robert Ray and Christian Keathley posit that director Alan Pakula and star and main creative force Robert Redford did so many counterintuitive things in making the movie that they elevated the story to the realm of myth and archetype.

Two major creative aspects accomplished this. First, they intentionally made the film challenging to follow. And second, they used a cinematographer, Gordon Willis, who used long nocturnal shots of buildings in a style that is contemplative more than action-packed. Redford as Woodward would keep rather than reduce complex lists of names and notes, something that might confuse the audience. Pakula shot the film from angles that made it difficult for viewers to know where Woodward and Bernstein’s desks stood in relation to top editor Ben Bradlee’s office. Willis’s cinematography often looked like art photographs of solitary buildings at night rather than the flow of a thriller.

Keathley and Ray argued that “for all the film’s meticulous recreation of reality … the people making it proved repeatedly willing to abandon both continuity and credibility for the sake of an aesthetically powerful moment.”

All the President’s Men also does something unheard of in today’s films. It allows the camera to be still. In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, Woodward tries to extract information from two sources that he’s trying to talk to on the phone at the same time. It goes on for six minutes and is more riveting than anything Marvel has produced in 10 years. It’s one of the reasons why the film made Woodward and Bernstein, and other reporters who take on the government and the powerful, heroes.

Today, of course, such behavior would get them banned from CNN and MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.