The Post

The Post (2017)

88% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 317 reviews)

Runtime: 116 minutes

Directed by: Spielberg

Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts

From: Quite a few different studios

The movie is not as bad as I heard some say... yet it's Spielberg so many would hope for better, me included:

This movie is pretty good yet with the talent involved you'd probably expect something better; at least I did. Comparisons to Spotlight doesn't help its case either as Spotlight is great in covering its investigation. It's not fair to compare the two as Spotlight showed the Boston Globe doing a lot of legwork to connect the dots and realized how severe the sex abuse scandal involving priests actually were, while this is different as the Washington Post literally had someone drop off part of the Pentagon Papers in their lap.

The Pentagon Papers is ripe material for a movie, and indeed others have been made about the topic, although they weren't as high-profile as this. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the papers to the press in 1971 and it caused a huge scandal as it showed that the unpopular Vietnam War was unwinnable and the United States government lied to the American public often about it in the preceding years. You don't need to be well-versed in the history of the Vietnam War as the movie explains enough about it and how the United States had been interested in the region for years as they did not want Communism to spread as it would create “the domino effect” of other countries in Southeast Asia to become Communist. The United States spent many years there and indeed it did not win; many got hot that their kids were sent over there under such circumstances; if not for a car accident shortly beforehand, my dad would have been drafted and probably would have gone to Vietnam.

Perhaps a movie about Ellsberg, how he leaked the information and the aftermath would have been more interesting than seeing the higher-ups at the Washington Post struggle over the decision to print the information themselves. I don't mean to slight Katharine Graham (played by Streep) or her struggles in being a woman who inherits the family newspaper and has to go through various struggles, including sexism. However, I know what I find to be the most interesting angle concerning those papers being released. The defending of the media against the government targeting it... sadly it's relevant today and even then, perhaps the New York Times and how they were the first ones to publish the Pentagon Papers would have been a more relevant target to focus on. After all, it was them and the Post that were together in the Supreme Court case that ruled on whether those documents should have had their contents made public. Then again, I understand the original idea was to focus on Graham and her life, and after Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 election the focus changed to this instead.


Yet I can still give it a decent rating due to its direction and the two stars being legends. The crowd seemed more enthused about the movie than I was, loudly applauding what was a rousing moment. I was not bored by the story that was weaved here; I don't regret seeing this yet it was not something I loved.