JackDoddy
/10 6 months ago
This is a right-wing propaganda piece with no redeeming qualities. It will be highly rated here on Trakt because the only people that will watch and rate it are trying to make a political point. If you watch this as someone who isn't in the very narrow target audience, you will recognise this for what it is: dogshit. If you take a step back and analyse it based on historical fact, you will also recognise this for what it is: a lie.
Many (if not most) Hollywood movies have a right-wing bent to them. Hollywood is a beacon of capitalism and individualism. However, for many reasons (anti-semitism, sexism, racism, the lack of artistic talent among the American right, anti-Republican actors, etc), the conservative and far-right sentiment in the US is that mainstream movies are somehow leftist or liberal. Some can be interpreted that way, but most are pretty conservative stories.
Why, then, do they hate Hollywood and its movies? Ironically, it's because the studios are giant capitalist enterprises that are interested only in selling their movies. Conservative and far-right political beliefs and values are unpopular and don't sell movies. Therefore, studios are forced to pay artists to make movies that reflect the views of the people they are trying to sell to more closely, without actually upsetting the status quo _too much_. For example, in order to sell movies to women, you need women with actual stories in them. In order to sell movies to people who aren't white, you need non-white characters in them. In order to sell movies to people who aren't straight, you need non-straight people in them. The writers and actors of these movies might care about the social and civil rights aspects, but to the studios and the shareholders of these studios, they are merely a capitalistic means to an end.
The US has, and always has had, a powerful far-right white supremacist movement, of which Reagan himself played a crucial role. Unlike the studios, they do care about the social and civil rights aspect of these stories. They hate them. It is a threat to them and their power. They will disregard even conservative stories being told, if that story has even a handful of references to people they don't like having any sort of agency or power.
That is, in short, why Republicans and the far right in America portray Hollywood and the media as 'liberal' or 'leftist', even when it's largely on their side like any other huge corporate enterprise. What keeps this situation balanced is that it tends to benefit both sides. Hollywood gets to sell their otherwise right-wing stories to everyone, including people that disagree with them, via 'diversity' set dressing. In other words, Hollywood gets to promote it's right-wing capitalistic and individualistic messages to liberals and leftists as long as it pays people to write stories with a couple of gay people in it or something. While this social message is sometimes a threat to the far-right, it's often actually helpful. It gives Republicans something to hate and create community around. Republicans still buy tickets to go and watch the movie _and_ they get to use it as part of their nonsense culture war stuff. It's win-win.
Ironically, that is what we learnt from Ronald Reagan them man himself. He was an actual member of the Californian 'liberal elite' who, like the rest of the 'liberal elite', actually believed some batshit crazy stuff and had a surface-level understanding of politics. This is the movie he would have made about his own life. That should say enough in and of itself.
Hollywood's dominance isn't threatened from the far right in kind. They can't make art for shit, when they do it is so weird and bad even they struggle to like it. They have to pretend to like it for the good of the cause, but they don't actually enjoy it. Just look at Sound of Freedom. When it was politically important for them to do so you could summarise their quotes on it as 'oh my god, this is the best and most important movie ever'. When it became clear they couldn't stand by the massive creep Tim Ballard any longer, suddenly it changed to 'actually, it was pretty boring and didn't make much sense'. The support of these pieces of art is not based on whether the art itself was good, but whether it was politically advantageous.
Reagan (the movie) is no different. Like Sound of Freedom, it is supposed to be based on historical fact, but bends it so much that this is almost entirely fiction. The entire point is to make a hero out of an actual real-life supervillian. Also like Sound of Freedom, that makes it incredibly boring as a movie. There is no tension, no growth, everyone feels fake, nothing feels real. Because it's not. If you threw in any actual facts about the man it would necessarily have to be a _very_ different movie. If you have to ignore 90% of the man's life to make him look like the hero, you end up with a character that's only about 10% believable as a human being.
You will only get any sort of enjoyment out of this movie if you are already so pilled you can't watch other movies without getting so angry that it hurts. That's the only way this makes sense. Everything else hurts you so much that something so bland and tasteless seems interesting by comparison. If other movies make you so angry you can't pay attention to the story just because they have even one person of colour on the screen who isn't either the enemy or the help, then you might get some enjoyment out of this.
For literally everyone else, this will probably be the worst movie you've seen this year. It's not even cringey or so-bad-it's-funny. It's just boring and preachy. Don't bother.
