Welyon Sutjipto

I went in expecting a straightforward fictional war movie with gratuitous explosions and a paper thin plot. Then I saw it was a A24 movie and had to very quickly change my expectations. At many points it was a hard watch, to hear about war atrocities and see pictures of the aftermath, and to witness it in real life, are two very different things. The movie as a middle ground reenacts these scenes and brings in the idea of how seemingly cavalier people can be, to do horrific things to each other in the name of this or that ideology. And that is the whole point of the movie: the ideology doesn't matter, the reason why the war broke out doesn't matter, what matters is how people can fight, bomb, execute, bury people in mass graves. The same people you'd call your friends and neighbors last week. The filmmakers were never going to give you a ficticious scenario of why this war broke out, and which side joined who, and who is 'right' or 'wrong' - that's really not the point. Did it disturb me that the war journalists portrayed in the movie would step over each other's dead bodies to get the shot? Yeah. It's fiction but it seems to be the way things would go in reality the way things are going. Unceremoniously killing off characters in the movie, illustrating the senseless violence and the absolute flimsy reason as to why you'd be fighting each other across the so called "greatest nation on earth" - you can't tell me it's not a great film. Take aside your own political bias and appreciate the scenes depicted in this. Especially I loved very much the style of stills coming in the middle of action sequences, these are very quick fleeting moments of reality that reflects what an actual war photographer would have gone through capturing some of their famous stills. And makes you think, how much it would take out of you to be in this scene and still be able to focus yourself on capturing the frame. All in all, the best films are those that are absolutely polarising in the right ways. This movie doesn't try to pander to any irl politics or conflicts that plague the real world. But a series of missteps is all it would take for this work of fiction to become part reality