6 Underground Has Incredibly Confused Politics (Even By Michael Bays Standards)

6 Underground Has Incredibly Confused Politics (Even By Michael Bay’s Standards)

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6 Underground looks like just a typical dumb action movie with Michal Bay’s usual flair, but it makes a number of complicated political statements.

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6 Underground Has Incredibly Confused Politics (Even By Michael Bays Standards)

Netflix’s latest release is Michael Bay’s action spectacle 6 Underground, a movie that has very confused politics. Starring Ryan Reynolds and Mélanie Laurent, 6 Underground is a film that embraces “Bayhem,” complete with frenetic zooms and pans, settings forever stuck in time during “golden hour,” and many fast cars, sexy ladies, and explosions.

6 Underground focuses on a team of mercenaries’ plot to stage a coup in a fictional Central Asian country, Turgistan. The story revolves around four action set-pieces in which the team must rescue the “good guy” and kill the “bad guys,” but the film’s coded politics are more provocative than one might think.

Bay’s most overtly political film is 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which centers on the 2012 attack in Libya, but nationalistic themes and imagery are found in Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, and even the Transformers franchise. In this vein, 6 Underground shoots the middle between these movies, not quite as political as 13 Hours but more than a backdrop. So what is 6 Underground saying, and why does that matter?

6 Underground Is Anti-Democracy

6 Underground Has Incredibly Confused Politics (Even By Michael Bays Standards)

Between action sequences, One (Reynolds) details why it falls on his team of highly trained professionals to solve the problem of Turgistan’s cruel dictator. Structurally, this monologue removes the team from governmental involvement; after all, the resources of most Western countries’ militaries could easily handle the challenges the team encounters, so the film has to justify their absence and the team’s involvement. One says, “Governments don’t really help people. So I said, ‘F**k the government. I’m going to do this myself.’” He later identifies “red tape” that he “couldn’t cut through with a billion-dollar sword” as the main reason why governments don’t “do the right thing.” This political ethos is similar to the one presented in 13 Hours: the government was disconnected from on-the-ground reality, so it was up to a group of contractors to solve the problem. What makes 6 Underground different is a total disassociation from American nationalism and American democracy. The unidentified U.S. president, One says, “doesn’t know how to spell Turgistan.”

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The “red tape” governments he’s referring to are presumably democracies, yet what makes democracies slow is the very element that makes them democracies: in a democracy everybody gets a say, and sorting all those voices takes time. And in the realm of geopolitics, which is a complicated network and a delicate balance, careful consideration is necessary. The complexities of the real-world interplay of foreign relations is glossed over within the film’s text and replaced with a rogue, unelected billionaire’s autocratic decisions. When he’s recruiting Seven/Blaine (Corey Hawkins), he says, “You could take out some truly evil people, not people that the government tells you are evil because based on, you know, policies or politics and bureaucracy or trade relations or any of that.”

His rejection of democracy’s deliberate slowness is compounded by the film’s visuals. The people of Turgistan never vote for the man who assumes power. Murat Alimov (Payman Maadi) is characterized as the “democracy-loving brother,” and in a scene with the dictator and main villain, Rovach Alimov (Lior Raz), Murat states, “The throne is not yours or mine. It belongs to the people.” His pro-democracy defense continues during the third action sequence when he rejects One’s plan: “This better not be what I’m thinking it is […] A coup exchanging my brother for me.”

His objections to One and his team are not explored, immediately interrupted by an action sequence. It’s true that the film paints “democracy-loving” Murat as a hero, but he’s a secondary hero. The real heroes are the ones with guns, who “actually do something,” as One says. These are the characters shot with Michael Bay’s signature wispy, slow motion, low-angle, glorifying cinematic language. Later, Murat is installed as head of state in the same undemocratic process that led to the film’s action in the first place – violence.

In 6 Underground Violence Solves Problems

The most disturbing scene of violence in 6 Underground isn’t the faceless henchman whose head explodes after a flash grenade is stuffed in his mouth or the other anonymous gunmen torn apart in car crashes; it’s when Three (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) says, “I’m just making the world a better place,” a sentence punctuated by a gunshot and Three’s murder of yet another nameless henchman. Here we have the explicit equating of altruism – “making the world a better place” – with murder.

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Violence is expected in an action film, but how that violence is justified in the film’s plot and framed by the director is a matter of ethical consideration and artistic choice. The artist frames the world deliberately, and in this world, violence is the normative solution to political strife. Turgistan’s dictator, Rovach Alimov, deserves no sympathy. He gases his own people, throws high-ranking military officers off a roof, strafes crowds with fighter jets. Of the bad guys, he’s “the worse guy,” as One calls him. The film sets up a scenario in which violence is the only language he understands and the only solution to the threats he poses. One outlines 6 Underground’s plot in the diner scene:

“This is how to stage a coup in three not-so-easy steps. [… First,] we’re gonna hit the four generals. They’re going to lead us to the brother. […] The second thing we’re gonna do is free the brother. And the last thing that we’re gonna do is we’re gonna say goodbye to the piece of s— dictator and hello to democracy-loving brother.”

Ignoring that’s not how any of that works in the real world and taking the film’s argument at face value, we see that regime change is not about empowering constituencies or the hard work of governance; it rests solely on extrajudicial killings. One says, “Our job as ghosts is to do the dirty work the living can’t or won’t.” In the film, that “work” is always violence.

But the film had opportunities to explore other means of problem-solving. Continuing the conversation where Murat objects to One’s coup or requiring One to convince Murat to go on state television to inspire the people to revolt – violently, of course – could have led to a dialogue that explores the issue on a broader scale. Beyond Ryan Reynolds quipping, cars zooming, women seducing, and explosions exploding, there’s a politics to “Bayhem,” and understanding that political viewpoint can be part of what makes 6 Underground even more interesting, engaging, and explosive.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/6-underground-movie-michael-bay-politics-confused-bad-explained/

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