The Post

Steven Spielberg's The Post is a newspaper political thriller depicting the time when highly classified Pentagon Papers about US government purposely sending off soldiers to Vietnam for war simply to avoid humiliation of American defeat even after knowing they have 0% chance of winning! Struggles faced by The Washington Post during coverage and exposure of this lie to the Congress and people, formed the crux.

The story began in a war setting, with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) realizing something's off and immediately documenting of what we'd assume urgent. Through this little event, we knew a bomb's about to go down later on. And it sure started to. Snuggling information out of the office was suspenseful! Spielberg managed to smartly condense, distill and highlight only necessary expositions enough for us to connect the dots ourselves through a photocopying procedure. Also, he's able to casually throw in vital information via conversations that flowed smoothly alike river.

Quality drives profitability was the theme. To represent each of these aspects, we have 2 stalwarts facing off one other. Tom Hanks was Ben Bradlee, a rebellious editor who's hungry for challenging news. Meryl Streep however, was the owner Katharine Graham who's trying hard to keep her precious family business safe from potential collapses. Just to see these two on a screen together was awesome! Their dialogues and arguments were rewarding to eavesdrop! Speaking of dialogues, uses of phrase and words were memorable such as "Don't walk." and "Keep your finger out of my eye."

Issue with the screenplay would be the way writers Liz Hannah and Josh Singer handled the first half of the motion picture. Post the exciting Inciting Incident, the story kept dilly-dallying with unnecessary meet-ups Katharine has, especially with the investors and board which could have been easily trimmed down by a ton. This chunk of valuable runtime should have been used to establish and tighten the inner conflicts and ramifications of the later-would-be published news article. For examples, Katharine mentioned she has a son who's at war, which should have been leveraged on to help this particular character in gradually arriving to make a hard decision at the second half. Or more time should have been allocated for sequences that had riveting potentials such as sending a spy to New York Times idea.

But, as soon as Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk, not to forget in an august performance!) reached out to get the remaining 47 volumes of the confidential papers, matters spiced up to a whole other degree during the last hour, and it was really funny too! Journalists have to finish reading, piecing and summating 4000 pages of data in 10 hours! What a nail-biting procession! So many hard decisions to make! Stakes rose for the company’s future! There's possibility of contempt too! 4-way phone call was a fascinating scene, pressuring Katharine visually from all corners, pushing her to stand on a cliff on whether to risk her fortune or not, lose her entire life or not, bet her everything against or not! When it all came down to her words, the closeup was powerful than any other clips prior and her final usurping speech was goosebumps inducing!

If you'd ever want to work for the press, this is the movie to watch as it showed the entire procedure from gathering source to printout loading dock! But more than that, the importance of press freedom was the ultimate inspiring takeaway! With the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon was teased at the end, only Spielberg could instigate a question of sequel for a historical biopic!