"Would you photograph that moment if I got shot?"
"What do you think?"
The journalists leave a desolate and collapsing New York to travel to the front lines in Charlottesville and then score the last interview with the president in DC, a place where Sammy (Stephen Mckinley) highlights, are shot on sight.
There are no reasons insinuated behind the conflict, but the film very intentionally takes an a-political stance, avoiding any political message to appease both sides. As an audience member you have to come to your own conclusions of the American politics rather than it be explained. Instead the focus is on the the journalists and their relationships with the violent reality that doesn't seem to foreign.
What is interesting is the depiction of journalism and the role of the free press in this film. The a-political stance reflects the idea of the responsibility of journalists to remain unbiased and neutral. The job is to ignore their believes and focus on the task in hand of photos that tell the story which are then interpreted by the public.
The film's general view is anti-war with the graphic imagery of the unnecessary loss of life. The journalists are continuously of the brink of a psychological breakdown, their greed to capture 'the perfect image' of the carnage at odds with their own empathetic limits.
As they say an image reflects 1000 words, but the danger of snapping that picture seems like an unworthy sacrifice in the film. The portrayal of the journalists ambiguous ethics arises in several well-choreographed scenes of conflict. The moments when the characters shadow soldiers mid-strike is thrilling and tense as with the agonising and messy murder hunts.
The loss of life becomes overwhelming
As the landscape changes over the course of their journey, the journalists are tortured at a gas station, witness a mass murder, watch victims be executed, lose fellow comrades and hide during an intense gun battle with the reason being 'they are shooting us so we are shooting back'.
Jesse Plemons in his cameo is exceptional, playing the most horrific villain in the movie and yet we cannot label which side of the fight he is on. The ambiguity of American citizens picking a side dissipates when they are either fighting only for themselves or ignoring that the war is even going on.
Throughout the film you see Jessie Cullen becoming desensitised to the violence but the gore does not slow down. It acts as a reflection of the speed that people become desensitised to conflict, regardless of if the violence continues or even heightens.
The plot twists were exceptional and added to the realities and atrocities that occur without a camera present when no reader of a newspaper would ever see. The loss of life becomes overwhelming and the attitudes of the characters towards death, sacrifice and danger they put themselves in to get the story for the newspapers is unbelievable.
The reflection back to an early conversation in which Lee talks to Jessie about taking photos and asking questions later is all very poetic and underlines the characters ideology of dying as a hero rather than surviving and watching their world burn without capturing the injustices. Your heart really sinks for Jessie in that final scene.
My overall thoughts are that the film is good extremely effective in capturing the disastrous effects of war. As an aspiring photojournalist I will maybe consider changing my career plan.