The aftershock of the Oklahoma City Bombing is still felt today.
The bombing revealed the degree to which white supremacist domestic terrorist groups were active in the United States. With the current mainstream rise of these groups in the United States, a film that dives into the radicalization of the vulnerable feels warranted. Today is the prime time for filmmakers to explore radicalization and white supremacy, and tie that exploration into our history.
However, with censorship and fear of retaliation being ever pervasive, it feels like Hollywood is scared to get aggressively political, as recently covered in the Hollywood Reporter. There seems to be a desire to call out generally hateful attitudes but not dive deep enough to explore their political origins. That dichotomy and attempt to have it both ways comes off strikingly in McVeigh.
McVeigh follows Timothy McVeigh (Alfie Allen) as he transitions into the white supremacist world and prepares for the bombing. Director Mike Ott seems mostly interested in exploring McVeigh’s detachment that made him vulnerable to radical ideologies than the ideologies themselves. His direction captures a creeping unsettling atmosphere that perfectly reflect’s McVeigh’s isolated mindset. You feel his loneliness and insecurity, brought on by trauma he sustained in the military. His interactions feel empty, rehearsed, and cold, conveyed chillingly by Alfie Allen. Even his interactions with his friend and future accomplice Terry Nichols (Brett Gelman) plant little breadcrumbs of validation that McVeigh doesn’t fit in this modern world.
For as much as McVeigh succeeds at visually getting into Tim’s headspace and psychology, the film drastically fails at diving into the ideology that radicalized him in the first place. The film plays small lip service to white supremacist culture and gun culture, but the never goes far enough to dive into the ideology. All of the groups and recruiting feel too broad and bland, with no meat to chew into. It’s like the film wants to make an apolitical Timothy McVeigh film, and that just makes the film feel empty.
McVeigh feels so much like a missed opportunity. There’s so much that could’ve been explored about incel culture, extremism, or radicalization, but the film opt’s out of diving into anything that could be viewed as “controversial”. Despite the skill and craft on display, the hollowness is clear, I don’t understand why anyone would want to make a non political film about a political domestic terrorist.
