The significance of January 6th is such that all I need to say is that date, and it’s likely you already know what I’m talking about. And it takes almost no leap to imagine a similar scenario that gets a whole lot worse. With that in mind, in 2023, the nonpartisan military veterans organization Vet Voice staged what they called a “war game” to play out what a version of that day might look like if the insurrectionists at the Capitol were more organized and even had co-conspirators inside the U.S. military, a situation no one involved these proceedings thinks is fanciful.
The result is documented in the new movie War Game, which brings together dozens of current and former intelligence, defense, and elected officials to play various governmental roles as they try to navigate a ramped-up version of January 6th. We see the former governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, play a president who’s just won re-election by a hair, and whose opponent insists the results were a fraud, setting the situation in motion. In this manufactured scenario, Bullock and his team have six hours to figure everything out and respond, after which, I guess, all is lost.
The film is incredibly tense, and even more so because there are clocks present in nearly every shot, keeping us constantly aware of the time and the stakes. And what we see is often frustrating, as when the insurrectionists are running roughshod over the government on social media with almost no official reaction. But I do wonder how useful watching any of this really is for our own understanding. Vet Voice is providing the actual government with a confidential analysis of it all, but as for the rest of us, we have mostly seen an edit that condenses the entire exercise into something that’s good drama, and that ends in a way that’s probably a lot more aspirational than realistic. I hope not, but I worry.
War Game plays August 29th and 31st and September 1st at the Tallgrass Film Center in Wichita.
