Watching this is the experience of 2006-era America looking at itself from every angle at once, overloading the rational mind and forcing itself directly into the id. But for all this film is so supersaturated as to be nearly incomprehensible on a first viewing, it's not actually nonsense—sitting down and parsing through the plot after the fact with the squad I watched this with, we found that everything one of us had missed or failed to understand someone else had a good explanation for this.
The superstructure of this film is the Christian book of Revelation, and it asks viewers to approach it in the same way: as a text to decode, to dig through the overwhelming mass of details and uncover meaning within whether it was intended or not. And there's a LOT here: the mythmaking around capturing extrajudicial killing on film, the way guns are used as pure symbols of power, the particular political fascinations of that moment.
This is rarely a smart film, and if anything that's a strength. It's an unfiltered vision of the moment, condensed as much as it can possibly bear into two hours and thirty-eight minutes, and left as a gift for all who come after with a desire to understand the psyche of a nation just beginning to die.
(cannes cut)
