I purposely read as little about this movie as possible.

I got the sense that it was somewhat reminiscent of, in its generalities, if not its particulars, to Alex Garland's Civil War, which we saw last year and did not care for.

Alex Garland with Civil War, I think, came across to me as somebody who didn't know what he was talking about.

Ariaster here, if anything, I think, is online to a fault.

I think he really knows what the discourses have been these last five years.

Just to come back to my initial impression, which, as I said, is sort of the inverse of yours, as the film is proceeding, and it's just throwing all this 20-20 stuff at you you, you've got mandates, you got online conspiracy theory, you've got young people who've just learned phrases like white supremacy and things like that, yelling at cops and street cops yelling back. You got all this stuff. And I'm thinking, okay, I don't know what is going on here. There's some funny stuff in this very, it's very sort of equal opportunity offender.

Where it seemed to be heading for me was this is just sort of a light, if abrasive as a viewing experience,

satire of, I don't know, parallel discourses from 2020, which to me is potentially interesting at the margins or particular scenes,

but it's not that interesting to me as a project. The film started to get me back quite a lot

in the later parts as it just gets increasingly insane as its reality and the realities of its

characters, most notably the character played by Joaquin Phoenix, the main character,

as the boundaries of social life in this town of Eddington, New Mexico, corrode, and as the

relationships between the characters corrode, and as their entire way of processing reality,

is more and more mediated to the point of being exclusively mediated by what they're seeing on

screens, particularly the screens they're carrying in their pockets. The film started to get

more interesting for me. While I did think by the end, you know, it kind of had this twist

ending is the wrong word, but it had this little epilogue, which to me was a bit superfluous.

Nonetheless, attempts to sort of read this movie as coming down on one side or the other

of these kind of two discourses from 2020, one that's a sort of lib-coded discourse

and one that's a right-wing conspiracy theory, coded discourse.

I don't think the film is exactly about either of those things.

I think it is really about

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