Starring Woody Harrelson. Rated PG

An opportunity is lost in this sincere, if bungling, account of the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the New York Times and every other American media outlet trumpeted the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, the Knight Ridder news service remained skeptical, and paid a small price for its intransigence.

Shock and Awe turns its focus on journalists Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) and Warren Strobel (James Marsden), along with columnist Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones)—a onetime Vietnam War correspondent—and their editor, John Walcott (Rob Reiner), all of whom obstinately stuck to the facts while the rest of the media pack acted as stenographers for Rumsfeld’s war party. Reiner also directs the TV-sized exercise, in which Harrelson and Marsden are sent on furtive meet-ups with ever more panicky Pentagon insiders and Beltway whistleblowers, while Milla Jovovich and Jessica Biel flap in the breeze as their significant others.

Flat-footed dramatics aside­—and we haven’t even mentioned the bludgeoning subplot about a black youth hit by shrapnel just hours into active duty—the real problem here is false consciousness. Joey Hartstone’s didactic, sermonizing screenplay is hardly any less fantastical than the lies it seeks to condemn, with the myth of American democracy and its robust Fourth Estate having been exposed a long time before the Bush gang came along. Shock and Awe is bad history offered as comfort to the pseudoresistance—or the #Resistance, if you like, given the film’s Clinton Democrat orientation. Those people voted for war too. And not because they read Judith Miller.

In fact, they’re still voting for wars. Between the trashing of Libya and Syria, and with all sides of the media seized by a deranged obsession with Russia, it seems that the clearly stated imperialist ambitions of the neocons continue without pause, no matter who’s in charge, and no matter who among them gets called out in Shock and Awe. Namely, in this case, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and the Project for the New American Century. That part’s actually quite thrilling, if easy game at this point. In any case, it’s not enough to see “liberal” Hollywood congratulate itself on recognizing one historic PR blitz for war. Where does it stand on all the subsequent ones? The answer, sadly, comes as no shock at all.

Published July, 2018