The War Game

A superb mystification that quite harshly shows what it could look like if Britain were hit by a nuclear war. Even after fifty years, the film still possesses immense power, thanks to its excellent direction, superb cinematography, and believable characters who often truly look like people affected by war. Excellent workmanship. (21/05/2015)

What is a film genre, or rather any other conceptual category that is supposed to allow us to facilitate the understanding of the world? In any case, something that is meant to have only an auxiliary function and to be discarded once it is revealed that the subject of investigation restricts and distorts rather than helps to clarify. The same applies to the "documentary" genre - although I would not attach too much importance to it, for example, here on FilmBooster, the documentary genre is not mentioned for this film. So, what is it then? I leave the invention of this new film category to film scholars, but its formulation is a necessity in the 21st century, as today, only a metaphysicist can work with the dichotomy of "objective reality" vs. "fiction." This is also evident in Watkins' case - the hypothetical "objective" (because it is based on government regulations, decrees, etc.) reconstruction gradually transforms into a fictional (because it never happened) story (and it is a story, after all, because the author is fabricating it!). Yet even that is not a completely imaginary story - it is a logically consistent imagining of that truly objective reconstruction. Moreover, Watkins also obviously manipulates the emotions of the viewer (for example, his attacks against the Anglican Church are completely arbitrary, although accurate), and he does so in a predetermined direction - an "objective documentary" should not do this, as the "facts" in it should speak for themselves. It requires inventing a new category, a new genre that will cover what is fictional in a documentary and vice versa, what is objectively/materially real in fiction. (10/03/2015)