Idealistic Joe allies with Thorne, a political prisoner who appears to offer a more humane and egalitarian world than that of the existant corrupt regime, and assists him in a successful coup. Unfortunately Thorne is not the man Joe had hoped he would be and so begins an unequal conflict between the two as the world descends into an ‘Orwellian' horror. Historical references in the film include Jean-Paul Marat, Kim Jong-Il, Fidel Castro, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, Francois Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Lyndon B Johnson, Julius Caesar, Robert Mugabe, the Provisional IRA, US POWs in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution et al.