The meaning of January 6thth is that all I have to do is mention that date and you probably already know what I’m talking about. And it’s almost no problem to imagine a similar scenario that gets much worse. With that in mind, the nonpartisan military veterans organization Vet Voice staged what it called a “war game” in 2023 to play out what a version of that day might look like if the Capitol insurrectionists were better organized and even had co-conspirators within the U.S. military, a situation that no one involved in these operations considers fanciful.
The result is documented in the new film War gamethat brings together dozens of current and former intelligence, defense and elected officials to play various government roles as they try to navigate a heightened version of January 6th. We see former Montana Governor Steve Bullock in the role of a president who just won re-election by a whisker, and whose opponent insists the results were fraudulent, setting the situation in motion. In this contrived scenario, Bullock and his team have six hours to figure everything out and react, and after that, I suspect, all is lost.
The film is incredibly suspenseful, and all the more so because there are clocks in nearly every shot, constantly making us aware of the time and the stakes. And what we see is often frustrating, as when the insurgents run roughshod over the government on social media with no official response. But I wonder how useful it is for our own understanding to watch it all. Vet Voice provides the actual government with an off-the-record analysis of the whole thing, but as far as the rest of us are concerned, we’ve mostly seen an edit that condenses the entire exercise into something that’s a good drama, and it ends in a way that’s probably far more aspirational than realistic. I hope not, but I’m worried.
War game plays on August 29th and 31st and 1 Septemberst at the Tallgrass Film Center in Wichita.
