Movie Review - Totally Under Control

Alex Gibney has become one of the top ten documentary directors in the country. He's been nominated for the Academy Award twice in the category of Best Documentary Feature. He won for his film Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). He's been nominated a dozen times for the Emmy, having won most recently for his film Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015). Gibney has tackled topics concerning sociopolitical scandals where institutions, either public or private, have failed the people that they're supposed to serve or even have actively harmed them. This documentary is perfectly placed right before the 2020 Presidential election because it's about how the Trump administration failed the American people in terms of protecting them from the COVID-19 pandemic or protecting them in better ways.

For those who have been following the news, particularly CNN or MSNBC, this film won't provide you with anything you don't already know, but, there are many who don't follow the news and there are details here that might be enlightening. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, following the news has become a vital thing. Everyone needs to stay informed because the coronavirus has upended everything. However, the film does lay down the timeline of the government's responses and thus failures in a very compelling way.

The basic supposition that the film tries to prove is that President Trump refused to accept the danger the coronavirus was bringing and he failed to act to prevent or minimize that danger because he was more concerned with his re-election campaign. A key component of which was the perception that the economy was doing well, which meant catering exclusively to certain business interests, even if they came into conflict with the interests of the public's overall health and welfare.

Of course, there were a lot of problems with regard to the messaging coming from Trump and his White House, which was constantly to downplay the danger of coronavirus and what's been described as lies about testing. What becomes the major takeaway from this film are three things. The first is related to testing. Throughout the month of February, while other countries like South Korea were very aggressive in testing and contact tracing, the United States wasn't doing anything, even though the first case had already been reported two months prior in Seattle, Washington.

The reason is because the test kits that were sent out by the CDC and FDA were flawed. States that got the test kits weren't able to test for the virus properly. For a month, the CDC didn't provide a test that worked, which allowed the virus to spread with no way for states to detect it. A lot of states weren't able to test properly until March, but, by that point, the virus had spread out of control.

The second takeaway from this film is the Trump administration's failure to provide masks and personal protective equipment, or what's known as PPE. If the goal is to get PPE to states as fast and as efficiently as possible, what the Trump administration did, especially vis-à-vis Jared Kushner in the month of March, is not just a failure. It's also incompetent or just plain insidious.

The third and final takeaway involves the process of reopening businesses and the economy that were mostly shutdown. It's here that one gets an impression that the Trump administration is more concerned with certain monetary interests than the healthcare of the population.

John Oliver accomplished the same thing as this documentary on the November 1st episode of his show. If you want a quicker and almost breathless take on this same subject matter, then check out Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Oliver even incorporates part of this documentary into his show. Otherwise, this is a great walk-through of what happened in terms of COVID-19.

Rated TV-14.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 4 mins.

Available on Hulu.