Filmmakers Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger have spent the last five months secretly constructing a documentary about the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. The end result is the movie Totally Under Control. As you’d expect, the film’s findings are not very flattering to our government.
Gibney, Harutyunyan and Hillinger interviewed scores of health care professionals, government officials and scientists to get their input on how President Trump and his team handled the COVID-19 situation. The trailer above is a greatest hits of bad moments: clip after clip of Trump dropping the ball, giving people false hope and completely ignoring the reality of the pandemic. It’s shameful, atrocious and very important people remember just how botched this crisis response has been.
Gibney has become a pretty reliable documentarian over the years, discovering the dirt on a lot of failing or dishonest institutions. It seems that this will be his biggest project yet, covering a topic that is truly historic. It’s smart that Neon is distributing Totally Under Control before Election Day (on-demand and on Hulu) because many people should see one final reminder of how they were let down by their leaders.
As we slowly inch towards a post-pandemic world, you can expect many more films (both fictional and documentary) that cover the response to the coronavirus and the utter carelessness and stupidity that got us even deeper into this mess. That’s a story that needs to be told again and again.