Intellectually dishonest and dangerous

Rating: 1/10 (3 December 2019)

I would've liked to see Hitler played completely straight instead of caricature and that would have been funnier and more intriguing. To play up our cognitive dissonance by him being stern, fatherly, helpful, his death by suicide would tear apart the boy's ideology and father figure leading to the post-film identity crisis, more resonant to the nation in reckoning. The film could have messed with its frame, towing the line of its satire politically to find a richer indictment of humanity underneath. Rather, its offensiveness is it seems to deny the boy his Nazidom, so ends up accidentally committing the worst of what it works so tirelessly to avoid, is trivializing the humanity at center. "You don't believe in anything, you want to be part of something." Too easy. The film shies from delving into the nation swept away in this movement. It denies their choice! So what exactly is it sending up? Hate, in the most arbitrary sense? No. It's why it desperately cycles through every shorthand of the genre to take the form of its acclaim, when its only intent is to rhyme with today, then obfuscates the parallels ignoring how the economics shorthanded into social scapegoating. I think taking a deeper stance beyond caricature would have been extremely provocative, and untenable in today's climate. Someone comically said, "They don't make films like this anymore"... But no, everything is like this. Here is a satire without any satire at all. Its tagline is, 'an anti-hate satire' is like the new Star Wars going on about 'the empire' without really elaborating on any sort of motive. Empire is enough. Everything operates in shorthand as a means to 'other' the dissidents. Is it intentional? Or a natural symptom or escalation of the NPC age? I just see cowardice: they believe delving into societal, cultural, economic context would invite it to be considered, so we are asked instead to shorthand it all as blind hate and trust them that none of the Nazi's really believed it and it's just a flaw in the code how dumb people take to ideologies like fads, guilty only of being manipulated. Then the film being plainly about Trumpism cheapens both the past and present. Look how the girl in the closet's arc only seems to be that she's not a ghost or vampire; it's not that she's human but that she's not not human. This is the true terror beneath this, that the very mechanism of prevention through othering, inherently leads to the continuation of the cycle.