‘War Game’: Sundance Review

Dirs: Tony Gerber, Jesse Moss. US. 2023. 94min

What if the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol had spiralled even further out of control? If National Guard forces joined with the protestors, while US military personnel and paramilitary groups took over state capitols and attempted to violently overthrow the rightfully elected President? That’s the central scenario of War Game, a briskly paced, compelling docu-thriller perfectly timed for another hotly contentious election year in the United States.

As engaging as it is thought-provoking

Co-directed by acclaimed non-fiction filmmaker Jesse Moss (The Mission, Boys State) and collaborator Tony Gerber (The Notorious Mr. Bout), War Game follows a simulated exercise that took place on January 6, 2023. Organized by a nonprofit group called Vet Voice, the ‘war game’ brought together a collection of prominent bipartisan former government officials, role-playing parts in this hypothetical political scenario —they describe it as “Coup Prevention 101” and a “stress-test for our National Security System”.

As engaging as it is thought-provoking, War Game should attract US media and international outlets with an appetite for America’s instability, as well as news junkies who do not already get enough drama from the real world. 

After briefly setting up the structure of the simulation, War Game plunges viewers right into the chaos. It’s 2025, in the aftermath of the next election, and Trump-like sore loser Robert Strickland, along with a paramilitary quasi-religious group called The Order of Columbus, are calling for revolt. Gathered in a Situation Room, the narrowly elected President John Hotham (played by Steve Bullock, the former Democratic governor of Montana) and his team (including former NATO Commander Wesley Clark as his Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp as a bullish Presidential Senior Advisor) have just six hours to alleviate the crisis—or lose the game and the future of democracy. Ratcheting up the suspense, there’s even a doomsday-like LED clock on the wall, counting down every minute.

While Hotham and his team debate how to deal with reports of thousands overrunning the capital and US miliary leaders advocating against him, we see protest footage from the actual January 6, 2021 attacks carefully updated to match the newly staged version—for instance, digitally altered images of signs on the Capitol Steps read “Strickland 2025”. Created with such proficiency and polished effects, the sequences only help contribute to the credibility of the scenario.

Meanwhile, outside the Situation Room, the film offers snippets of context. There are the game designers and consultants—including real-life Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, made famous during Trump’s first impeachment hearings—orchestrating the proceedings and offering analysis of what’s unfolding. In another room, we meet the ’Red Cell’ operatives overseeing the insurgent forces, who discuss ways to fluster the President and his advisors, such as flooding social media with false-flag fake news reports aimed at sucking them deeper into the conflict. Early on, British actor Ralph Brown (Withnail & I, Alien 3) shows up as a convincingly rogue US Lieutenant General, who, in one of the film’s rare moments of humour, breaks character in between takes to crunch into an apple.

Yet it is all less cheeky than Moss and Gerber’s previous collaboration, the wry 2008 documentary Full Battle Rattle, which also depicts war simulations—with US soldiers clumsily trying to pacify a fake Iraqi town in California’s Mojave Desert. If the former film wrings painful truths about the horrors of war through satirical fictional enactments,War Game is more serious and straight-forward, observing the participants in the simulation as they, with furrowed brows and anxious solemnity, try to avoid a Civil War.

Occasionally, War Game breaks from the fictional plot to find emotional pathos in the Vet Voice organizers—US military veterans who believe the government is not doing enough to root out white supremacists and far-right militants in its own ranks. There’s Vet Voice Game Producer Janessa Goldberg, a devoted U.S. Army Veteran, who speaks of being among the first class of queer soldiers, and ‘Red Cell’ leader Kris Goldsmith, who was inspired by 9/11 to fight in Iraq, but whose PTSD has since fueled a different kind of patriotic duty to hold his leaders more accountable. Their real stories of dedication and disillusionment greatly help fill out the contours and stakes of the game.

But Moss and Gerber focus mostly on the simulation. Much of the film—and its tension—eventually coalesces around a singular issue: whether President Hothman will invoke the Insurrectionist Act, which would allow the US military and National Guard troops to act against their own citizens (“It’s a trap,” whispers General Clark.) And the story within the documentary eventually builds to a stirring resolution with an impressive speech given by Bullock’s President. But should we feel good at the end of a film about America’s near political collapse? And, if there are rogue, anti-government members of the US military, how much are they an actual threat? As entertaining and efficient as War Game is in tracking its make-believe scenario, perhaps it could have delved deeper into the real catastrophe unfolding daily in America right now.