We’re approaching the 2024 U.S. presidential election’s climactic stretch. We’re still processing the whiplash from a landmark sequence of events that could’ve been pulled straight from a blockbuster political thriller — a former President’s attempted assassination, a sitting President’s historic withdrawal announcement, and a once-lampooned Vice President’s sudden reversal of her political fortunes. Whichever nominee wins out, it’s inevitable that we’re hurtling toward some measure of unprecedented territory. Among its other effects, the recent swell of excited fascination among liberal circles seems to have at least temporarily dispelled the dark shadow looming over not just this electoral cycle, but our political reality in general.
After the previously unprecedented United States Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, no longer can we live with the unshaken belief that the peaceful transfer of power is some unassailable tradition. At the end of 2021, three retired military generals penned an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that preparations for a completely possible January 2025 insurrection attempt should be underway. Fears about unchecked extremism in the American armed forces had been (and are still) mounting. One idea they recommended was for the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to conduct a “war game” — in other words, simulate an insurrection scenario to assess the government’s preparedness and explore the implications another attack would reveal. Two years following January 6, a non-partisan veterans organization called Vet Voice staged just such an exercise.
War Game is the product of the filmmakers permitted to document the affair, a timely docu-thriller aiming to evoke the paranoiac intrigue of Homeland, the ticking-clock tension of 24, and the odic reverence for political prudence befitting The West Wing. The men and women around the table are a bipartisan collection of current and former government officials from the last five presidential administrations — counterintelligence operatives and cabinet secretaries, governors and lieutenant generals, spokespeople, senators, and Secret Service agents. But intermittent flashes to ominously analogous real news headlines and on-the-scene clips of the actual Capitol rioters throughout never truly distract from the fact that we’re just watching a group of grown adults do what high schoolers do in Model UN. The stock political drama score, cinematic lighting, and close-up shots on the participants all enhance this artifice, creating a distancing layer that sacrifices meaningful investment in the situation room decisions for a safer, digestible audience experience.
It doesn’t feel right to classify War Game as forgettable. Both the gimmick and the subject matter it taps into are too salient for anyone but the most politically oblivious to not carry some impressions with them as the lights go up and they step back out into the world. Yet the film lacks any daring verve, the incisive potency that could have elevated it to a more remarkable place. The war game exercise shown fails to bear much fruit from some fertile thematic ground. Lost is a more considered exploration into what separates more principled approaches from the more dire “ends justify the means” options that begin to crop up when faced with an existential threat. The group handles the escalating events rather technocratically. There are no true ideological conflicts between the participants, only strategic ones. What could a more unsparing examination into the possibilities and limitations of bipartisan collaboration — especially when the very country is on the line — look like? The group’s consistent coolheadedness provides a comfortable equilibrium in the situation room. It’s a testament to the professionalism expected from those who would handle such an event in real life, but between this even-keeled restraint and the lack of reference to the chaos beyond side character status updates and glaringly phony broadcast news segments, it’s tough to believe in the fiction that’s framed with such grave import.
Short on thrills, the film’s “documentary” component feels perfunctory at best. Cuts to various talking heads are present purely because they are apropos to the format. Sometimes they are asides to comment on and telegraph the exercise’s chief concerns and goals; other times they offer different participants a sliver of limelight to summarize their pasts and through that nod to some additional dimension of America’s extremism crisis — polarization, identity, white supremacy, AI- and social media-powered disinformation. Perhaps in different hands, this metafictional component would work to more compelling effect, but here, it’s clunky, interrupting the pacing and underscoring the film’s schematic approach. Decent popcorn entertainment for political nerds and news junkies is far from any sort of disservice, but the niggling suspicion that War Game could have been a better, even monumental, film cannot be dismissed.
A second, smaller group acts the part of the fictional Order of Columbus, a band of alt-right true believers and radicalized military personnel driving the exercise’s insurgent conflict, and War Game arrives at its richest material when delving into personal histories of these participants. They’re former soldiers who’ve experienced the disillusionment, trauma, lack of resources, and lack of purpose that have made so many of their comrades ripe for radicalization. This is the sort of more immediate, human drama that could’ve propelled some trenchant analysis into our politics’ failed promises, our infrastructural oversights and blind spots, and our increasingly uncertain, hypermediated culture’s destabilizing effects on its most vulnerable citizens.
Any film tackling January 6, 2021, and its aftermath has the opportunity — if not the responsibility — to unpack our nation’s shortcomings. It can plunge into the chasms that divide us and unearth how united we are in our capacity for fear and our desire for order, certitude, and justice, however we may define and express these things. Of course, that’s a tougher logline to market, particularly to a moviegoing crowd more likely to prefer a cozier and palatable reflection of real events versus a troubling, morally complex reckoning of them. So, the Order of Columbus actors form what’s barely a B-plot, and we instead stay in the situation room to be reassured that our institutions will continue to stand and our tempering, liberal democratic values will win the day. War Game proves, then, to be little more than a nifty thought exercise caught on camera, an insubstantial peek under the hood into how Beltway bureaucrats address the challenges threatening our republic.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Moss & Tony Gerber; DISTRIBUTOR: Submarine Deluxe/Decal; IN THEATERS: August 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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