Movie Reviews

What Chapaev Can Teach Us About War and Ukrainian Death Battalions

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Recently Maria and I watched the 1934 Soviet film Chapaev, a biopic of Vasily Chapaev, a Russian folk hero from the Civil War. 88 years later, this movie aged well and is still as relevant as ever. Movies tend to grow stale over time and become unwatchable (who wants to watch a typical film from the 1930s, for the love of God), but this isn’t one of them. Chapaev is just as watchable and exciting as any contemporary war movie, and the lessons are just as important now as they were when it first hit the silver screen.

What ‘Come and See’ Can Teach Us About Ukraine

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what come and see can teach us about ukraine

Come and See (Иди и смотри), the iconic 1985 World War II movie by Elem Klimov, offers western audiences valuable insights into the Russian mindset. Unfortunately, they were all lost on us. We see the “horrors of war” trope and it overwhelms all of the other much more important lessons. On top of that, our minds are shielded by 80 years of Cold War propaganda, and the morality of Come and See goes over our heads.

The Matrix Resurrections and the Death of Democracy

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The Matrix Resurrections and the Death of Democracy

The Matrix Resurrections is a boring, sloppy, incoherent mess. But it does offer some valuable cultural insights that we should pay attention to. Despite endlessly talking about “democratic norms” and holding democracy summits, Western liberals don’t like democracy. They actually hate democracy and associate it with weakness, and this attitude is very apparent in their movies.

Threads and the Failure of Satire

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Threads and the Failure of Satire. 1984 BBC Film Threads

I just watched the 1984 BBC docudrama Threads. In many ways, it is typical of a Cold War film at the height of the Red Scare. However, Threads created a new pinnacle of propaganda. The film’s creators deliberately terrorized an entire generation of children and skillfully blurred the lines between truth and fiction. Threads mimics real news reports, presenting a chain of events that are difficult to distinguish from real-life media, especially for a child. Despite all the praise it received in the years since then, Threads is a horrible film that teaches all the wrong lessons, and didn’t even make a nuclear war less likely. If anything, this wave of propaganda has made self-inflicted armageddon more inevitable than ever before.