The all seeing eye of journalism tries to journey impartially across a star-crossed USA.

From the title get-go this is clear, it’s a film about an American Civil War.  And it’s referenced multiple times that the West (Texas and Cali) are moving East to take down the president.  They say 19 states have seceded in the trailer.  There is a map, but I couldn’t figure it out.  There’s something unfathomable going on with the Floridans too.

But I LOVE that that is where the clarity ends.

They never discuss what has cause the rift.  Or why what I perceive as states of unlikely allegiance have teamed up.  Never once do they explain how the military split, if there was a coup.  If there’s a president of the two star union.  It’s all as clear as mud and I loved it because it made the bedrock of the story so much stronger.

Because the story is about journalistic lens.  It’s about war journalists heading into war zones and hoping they are granted the grace to document death and destruction, and not be killed in the process.  And as they travel across the landscape they go behind the scenes on what appears to be both, if not multiple sides of the fighting.  Sometimes they’re with the plain clothes, sometimes the uniforms.  And to be honest, I almost feel if I watched again with more subtlety, I might find that there are more than one form of uniforms?  

And the thing is, is it a dystopian hell hole or is it just a war zone?  Is a war zone by nature a dystopian hell hole, or just a thing on tv?  And why not both?  And I truly valued the script and the way it imparted these excellent takes on it, all delivered by Kirsten Dunst’s unflappable character.  Most importantly the idea that a journalist shoots so others can judge.  That it’s important to shoot a soldier’s triumphant kill no matter if it looks like a war crime or not.  Because the journalist is not the judge or jury, merely a medium.

It’s a family roadtrip of an adventure, with three generations of journalist crammed into the car.  The elder statesmen, the two middled-aged journos driving the whole trip on their hope to interview the president, and finally the twenty-ish youngster.  Most of the trip feels somewhere between a hazing, indoctrination and trial by fire for her.

There are a lot of gritty scenes, and I guess a lot of these will feel even grittier somehow because they’re not in “a foreign country.”  It’s basically a grab bag of war drama an atrocity from any given war but on US soil.  And I guess, given the US involvement in so, so many wars on “foreign soil” the poetry of “the West is moving in for the kill” is not lost.

Towards the end there is some of the best modern military fighting in a US city that I have seen in film to date.  I feel like the last time I saw fighting like that was in Battle Los Angeles (2011) where Michelle Rodriguez is part of a squad trying to hold out against an alien invasion.

And so I loved this.  I really valued not knowing which side of the war I should be on.  That I could, as Kirsten explained, only make judgements on what I was seeing through the lens.  And in that, both sides seemed, well, at war.

In the end, great photos are taken, quotes collected.  And we’ll never know if the younger journo kept everything on that last roll of film or not.

I don’t know why she insisted on shoot on physical film but it made for nice “development” in the credits.

J* gives it 4 stars.