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Totally Under Control (12)
Directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger
WITH the US presidential elections just under two weeks away, Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, along with co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, take an in-depth look at how President Donald Trump and his administration have mishandled the response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
The timeline and numbers are damning.
With more than 226,000 people dead from the virus and over 8.5 million others infected, the film asks why the United States failed to confront a danger it should have been so well prepared for.
Tellingly, the film compares the US response to that of South Korea.
Both countries discovered their first cases of Covid-19 on January 20 but their strategies were poles apart.
While the South Koreans immediately opted to introduce a countrywide test-and-trace programme, resulting in just 450 deaths, the US government dragged its feet and didn’t introduce the beginnings of a national testing programme until late February, by which time the virus had spread out of control.
Shot in secret during lockdown, an extraordinary feat in itself, Gibney and his co-directors interviewed countless scientists, medical professionals and government officials on the inside who exposed a system-wide collapse caused by incompetence and a lack of presidential leadership. Their damning, eye-opening testimonies are chilling.
Trump’s claims at the start that the virus was “totally under control” and how it would one day just go away were at odds with the scientists’ and health experts’ findings and their warnings to the White House.
Yet those who contradicted Trump’s narrative were fired. You can empathise with their frustrations and despair.
The other key question posed by the film — what did the president know and when — was answered by Trump himself, who admitted how deadly the virus was in a taped interview with journalist Bob Woodward on February 7, two weeks before the first Covid-19 death. Yet he continued to play its seriousness down publicly.
Gibney delivers a painstakingly detailed analysis of incompetence, corruption and denial which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in this gripping documentary, which every US voter should see before going to the polls.
