Death of a Nation movie review (2018)

The ensuing film is D’Souza’s usual stew of cherry-picked facts, overt omissions, inept historical reenactments, slanders, innuendos, stuff taken from his earlier movies, shots of him walking pensively through empty areas and clips from other and better movies. Perhaps realizing that he has gone to the well with pinning the Civil War and slavery on Democrats, D’Souza expands here to talk about the influence that the Democratic party had on a budding young Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler, who, according to this film, learned everything he knew about genocide, directly from Jacksonian Democrats. In America, this was all celebrated by progressives and Democrats, especially since Hitler’s true purpose was the eradication of Christianity, and they would continue to celebrate his beliefs after the war in ways ranging from supporting abortion rights (turns out Mengele performed illegal abortions in South America after escaping Germany) to gay rights (apparently most Nazis were gay). “Read the Nazi platform at the Democratic convention and it would most likely receive thunderous applause,” D’Souza intones, in case someone out there has yet to get the point.

“Okay,” you might ask, “but what about something like the horror of Charlottesville?” Well, unlike Trump, who tried the “both sides” argument, D’Souza blames it all entirely on progressives and Democrats once again. How does he swing that? He interviews white nationalist Richard Spencer and twists things around until Spencer states that he feels that he has a “white Malcolm X philosophy” and that “I guess I’m a progressive.” When he tries to talk to Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville rally, who he has tried to claim is a CNN employee, an Obama supporter and a member of the Occupy movement (claims that have been discredited), he gets nothing but a load of racist invective. In voiceover, D’Souza smirks “He still seems to be part of the Occupy movement.” Meanwhile, “Trump is a flag-waving patriot who cherishes the American founders” trying to run the country despite the efforts of the Deep State to run him out of office for no reason whatsoever. (Needless to say, the countless scandals surrounding the administration are not even mentioned here.)

As badly as “Death of a Nation” fails as history, it's even worse when judged on cinematic terms; he and co-director Bruce Schooley have really outdone themselves here, if that is quite the right phrase to describe it. The whole thing has been put together with the kind of style and flair that would barely pass muster on YouTube, the historical reenactments are remarkably lifeless (with the actors playing Lincoln and Hitler coming across so poorly that they seem barely capable of leading lunch orders, let alone nations), and it drags so badly that it feels as if it is covering 200+ years of history in real time. The most incompetent parts of the film are the interviews that D’Souza conducts at a few points. For the most part, they have been filmed and edited in such a haphazard manner that you get the weird sensation that he and his subject were either never in the same room together or the talks were wildly edited at some point. (The only interview where you get the sense of an actual conversation being captured comes when D’Souza spends several minutes practically fawning over disgraced right-wing activist and Project Veritas head James O’Keefe.)

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