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NEW YORK (AP) — Election results are contested. Far-right extremists groups are plotting to overthrow the electoral college vote count. Protesters gather in Washington. TV news screens blare: “Capitol in Chaos.”
In the White House Situation Room, the president gathers with advisors to consider their next moves. Only this is not January 6th, 2021, but a simulation of an insurrection very much like it.
In January last year, a group of former generals, senators, governors and civil servants gathered in a Washington D.C. hotel to run an exercise, a war game, to experience the United States on the brink of civil war in January 2025, and, maybe, to find a few ways to avoid a widely shared American nightmare.
In this queasily familiar but slightly alternate reality, the incumbent is President John Hotham, played by the former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
“On the one hand, I’m fairly used to dealing with challenging situations,” Bullock said in an interview. “Here, it really was between the fog of war and the fog of disinformation, trying to figure out what was right not just for today but for tomorrow. It was definitely a tense six hours.”
For those six hours, Bullock and a group of government and military officials — both Democrats and Republicans, many of them highly accomplished — lived through a U.S. coup. And throughout it, directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss were there with cameras to catch everything that unfolded.
Their film, “War Game,” which opens in theaters around the country Friday, is an almost-real political thriller that marries improvisational theater and dystopian science fiction to add up to a sobering documentary about our current political reality. It’s a “Dr. Strangelove” for today.
“I couldn’t help but feel that it was prophetic, that it would be a kind of crystal ball that would help us peer into a possible future, perhaps to avoid it,” says Moss. “We didn’t know if the country would descend into civil war.”
The game was conceived by Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit group for veterans. The group was motivated by the fact that military veterans were prominent in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol; nearly one in five of those charged with their involvement had a military background. A particular inspiration was a Washington Post op-ed by retired U.S. generals who wrote that they were “chilled to our bones” at the possibility of a successful coup, and raised the concern that rogue military units could throw the chain of command into disarray.
“Given what we saw on January 6, anything is plausible,” says Retired Gen. Linda Singh, who plays the chief of the National Guard Bureau in the film. “For us, it may not necessarily be active military, but we’ve seen a lot of veterans in that group, whether they’re working for police departments or they’re retired. We have to plan for the most extreme.”
In “War Game,” the fictional group of extremists, the Order of Columbus, is led by Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who became disillusioned after fighting in Iraq after Sept. 11. In the film, he says he’s playing a twisted version of himself. Some 7% of the National Guard are said to be members of the Order of Columbus, which backs Gov. Robert Strickland (the actor Chris Coffey) for president.
In the mix are some renown politicians and former members of the military who have been known for prioritizing country over politics. They include Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, the former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp and Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who in 2019 testified about former President Donald Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine in which he asked him to smear his political rivals.
“I take both my testimony in front of Congress and my participation in this movie to be a showcase of career public service, solely interested in the public good and U.S. national security,” Vindman says. “You could agree or disagree with some of the decisions that were made, but I think we effectively showcased folks looking out for the U.S.”
In that way, “War Game” may less represent a fearful possible future than it does what the dedication of career civil servants looks like. “Those are patriots. All of them — Democrats and Republicans,” says Bullock, a Democrat who was twice elected governor in the largely conservative Montana.
“I’d like to think they reflect our political system,” says Gerber. “I think they reflect the best of our political system.”
“War Game,” which nearly matches the title of the 1983 Matthew Broderick nuclear war thriller, Moss calls a kind of prequel to Alex Garland’s near-future-set American dystopia “Civil War,” released earlier this year. Moss also, with Amanda McBaine, co-directed one of 2024's other notable election-related films: “Girls State,” which documents Missouri teenage girls forming a mock government. That film, with Vice President Kamala Harris now the Democratic nominee, Moss considers newly relevant. Meanwhile, “War Game” seems to shift week to week. In one scene, an assassination attempt is discussed as a remote possibility.
“The film seems to change every time it screens,” says Gerber. “But the relevance of our film does not end with this election. The issues we currently face did not arise overnight. It’s been a long, slow bake to get to this point. We as a nation have a lot of self reflection in store and hopefully ‘War Game’ is part of that process.”
In “War Game,” the situation turns perilous. Military bases are compromised. State capitols are overrun. Given the urgency, President Hotham is advised to hack the email of his opponent, who is opposing the peaceful transfer of power, and to declare the Insurrection Act — the possible implementation of which has been a rising anxiety for some analysts. Bullock, playing president but looking the part, opts against such moves, arguing that they have to consider the ramifications down the line.
“Wherever we are on the political spectrum, preserving the rule of law and the underpinnings of this 250-year experiment is pretty damn important,” says Bullock. “It is concerning to me that the vice presidential nominee (JD Vance) said if he was Mike Pence he would have done otherwise. But we have got to remember, there are things more important than an individual election and that’s sort of the promise that this country has offered.”