The Post (2017)
Friday, January 19, 2019 -
Does America need a big, dumb love letter to the First Amendment at a time when its big, dumb president is hell bent on destroying the free press?
I’d be into that.
But does Steven Spielberg’s The Post offer anything more than self-congratulatory, overly simplistic, and perhaps even incipiently anti-democratic pablum?
Well… yes and no.
The Post tells the story of the 1971 debate within the editorial and business ranks of The Washington Post about whether or not to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a trove of top secret documents that outlined decades of bipartisan executive branch decisions to keep the U.S. engaged militarily and politically in Vietnam.