Thoughts about Brexit: The Uncivil War

[Atypical-Abbie]

I don't know a lot about Brexit at all, I had heard that it was a very messy situation, with lies and confusion throughout the entire campaign, and as someone who is quite new to politics in general, and international politics, British politics at that, I had no clue what was going on, and then when the people had voted, it turned out that the winners had broken the law as well, and that the promises would be much harder, and much longer to even accomplish, and the general response seemed to be "we told you so" and "well you won, so what now?", so yeah, all of that was something in the background of my life for a while, since its impact to me as an individual seemed quite small, yet it also is one of the most interesting situations in modern day politics, such a huge powerhouse leaving the EU will obviously have massive consequences, so I figured that I would eventually have to educate myself a bit, but I had no idea where to start, but then I heard about this movie, led by Benedict Cumberbatch, and since I seemingly have to watch everything he's in now, I decided to give it a go. And well, what I can say is that it was surely...interesting.

 

I can say that I learned some things I didn't know before, the most noticeable and what also seemed to be the main point, exploring the inside politics of how they managed to win. It feels weird to really spoil a movie that's based on live events, so I will try to be vague instead, since you know, these are things that supposedly happened, accuracy is always debatable when it comes to politically motivated biopics, but I don't think that there's anything you couldn't confirm with a Google search anyway, but I digress, the whole idea of getting people outside of the normal demographic by targeting them with ads is an idea that is both scary and fascinating at the same time, and that it's able to put that across as the effective and only option works well, since you can see the peculiar character Cumberbatch portrays here as the exact person who would go all in for this idea. Well, that is of course in the way he's portrayed here that makes it work, since he's portrayed in the most Cumberbatch way possible, he's an intelligent, yet manic and unpredictable person, which is exactly what Cumberbatch does well, but at times, it feels like shots are taken straight out an episode of Sherlock or Patrick Melrose, to say that it feels out of place in a political biopic is an understatement, I would say it would work if the movie had leaned into that more, but for the most part, it's just trying to portray the process of a political campaign, with all of the strategy of finding out where you want to put your message, to the focus groups and slogan making, all of the stuff that you can put into film well, which is done fine here, at least from the Leave side of things, since the Stay side is not focused on as much, which feels like shame since I would have liked to learn more about that side, but focusing it on the winners makes more sense I suppose, since that is the most interesting part. I also wish that the aftermath had been focused on a bit more, but it's an ongoing thing, and this was most likely in production for a while, so it's hard to stay up to date. In the end, I enjoyed this movie, and as someone who doesn't follow politics or the whole Brexit situation in general, doesn't really watch any political movies or shows, and who mainly came to see Cumberbatch do his thing, I got more out of this than I thought at first.