Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Perhaps a bad film is just a bad film. There’s been Oscar-bait for decades. But it wasn’t until very recently that people started thinking of films as justice. It wasn’t until very recently that people began to qualify negative criticism with, “this story deserves to be told, but…” Perhaps I think too little of film for a cinephile. I see it as a great success as an empathy machine, but as entirely limp when it comes to enacting change in the real world—and that’s the only place you’ll find justice. Justice at the movies is killing Hitler in Act III of Inglourious Basterds. It’s a bit of catharsis.

Don’t get me wrong, cinema is a bellwether of culture. It impacts norms. It matters on a social level a tremendous amount. But it ain’t resurrecting the dead. It ain’t stopping bombs from falling. It ain’t ripping a demagogue out of office—though it may help him get there.

This is to say that all and any praise laid upon a film for committing “a noble effort” is empty horse shit. There is no A for effort at the movies. A noble stinker is the same as an ignoble one—and this movie stinks.

Let’s perform a simple mental exercise. Let’s imagine how this film would work if all of its characters and events were fictional. If we do this, we can see how shapeless and lacking in perspective this film is. Its entire existence is predicated on the exaltation of Marie Colvin. We can imagine the filmmakers huddled together before production started, telling one another how important it is that they do right by the source material. That is a wank. That is arrogance. That is the issue: the fact that the filmmakers think their work suddenly matters because it covers such and such topic. The subject matters in the real world. Your facsimile of it does not.

What’s worse is that thinking of this kind leads directly to propaganda. “Honoring the subject” is shorthand for glorification and glorification is the essence of propaganda.

My point is that you should never want to tell a story because it’s an important story. You should want to tell a story because it’s a good story. The importance of the material is beside the point. It’s immaterial.

But this isn’t just committing the based-on-a-true-story sin of cinema. It’s also committing the biographical film sin, which is such because a biography is not a story. It’s lacking in all the cause and effect that propels a good story along. No points in the plot lead from one to another. There’s just this, and then there’s that, and finally there’s one last thing. It’s a crime to storytelling.

This is a film about war photography, so there are obviously plenty of themes that could be explored. For one, the similarity in voyeurism between Marie and us as cinema viewers. But the makers of this film are so fixated on Marie the person that they forgo any other themes and reduce the story to Marie, her motivation, and her pain.

One extraneous note: what is wrong with the coloring of this film? All the Caucasian actors’ skin is so red and blotchy it looks as if they’ve got hives. My best guess is that they were trying to replicate the film stock of the war photography of the era like Three Kings did quite successfully, but utterly failed.