Monday, July 29, 2024

War Game

Extremism is always the other side’s problem. Sure, your wing of the political spectrum might have a few people who are a bit “over-enthusiastic,” but their hearts are in the right place. That is the attitude that allows extremism to flourish and it is reflected throughout the real-time crisis roleplay simulation documented in Tony Gerber & Jesse Moss’s War Game, which opens Friday at Film Forum.

In recent months, America has witnessed violent protests on behalf of Hamas terrorists, record numbers of hate crimes targeting Jewish Americans, and an apparent lone wolf attempting to assassinate the former and perhaps future president of the United States. So, what is the crisis the Vet Voice activist group will simulate? Of course, an insurrection made possible by MAGA-like infiltration of the American armed forces.

To be clear, the villains in this scenario are undisguised proxies for Trump and company. At one point, actors are told: “you’re the Bannon, Stone figures,” presumably meaning Trump’s advisors, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. Yet, one senior military veteran assures viewers he only agreed to participate because it was a non-partisan project.

The “nonpartisan” group includes three former Democrat politicians, Doug Jones, Heidi Heitkamp, and Steve Bullock, former Democrat presidential candidate Wesley Clark, former Obama appointees Louis Calder, Doug Wilson, and Gwen Camp, Clinton appointee Joe Reeder, Bush II CIA staff holdover from the Clinton administration David Priess, Bush II appointee (and Trump critic) Jack Tomarchio, Trump-appointee-turned-Trump-critic Elizabeth Neumann, Alexander Vindman, the prime witness against Trump during the first impeachment hearing, and Peter Strzok, the FBI official who was fired because his anti-Trump texts compromised the Mueller investigation. Indeed, like “extremism,” “nonpartisanship” is very definitely in the eye of the beholder.

It also somewhat negates the value of this exercise, because everyone already shares the same fears regarding the premise. It would have been fascinating if the game-managers had secretly flipped the script on their players, forcing them to confront a scenario where Antifa and anti-Semitic extremists were violently refusing to accept the election of a strongly pro-Israel president, which anyone watching events on college campuses over the last six months must recognize as a terrifying possibility. Unfortunately, such a scenario would not advance the game-managers’ ideological goals.

Instead, they have produced a film that will make “never-Trump” Republicans and independents two or three times more likely to vote for the ex-president. The mug sense of moral superiority is a bad look, but the impact of hearing radicalized veteran Kris Goldsmith rhetorically ask January 6
th rioters: “Why was I shooting farmers in Afghanistan while you’re still breathing?” will be absolutely toxic for any middle-of-the-roader.

Frankly,
War Game presents such a stacked deck it holds no policy-making value. However, watching former Governor Steve Bullock dither indecisively while role-playing POTUS should at least disqualify him from any further elections for higher offices. Extremists within the military ranks might very well be a valid concern, but War Game never makes a convincing case—because it never thinks it even needs to. Radical extremism is also a pressing concern on college campuses and within both major American political parties. However, instead of uniting people, War Games will only further polarize us. Not recommended, War Game opens Friday (8/2) at Film Forum.