Looking back at the year’s pandemic and protests, 2020 feels like a sci-fi horror film. Totally Under Control, a documentary directed by Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, focuses on the United States government’s response to the coronavirus. If you were to watch this movie without any knowledge of this pandemic, the documentary would seem like a fabricated horror film. But it’s not.
The documentary, filmed in secret over five months, strings together the Trump administration’s different mistakes in handling the pandemic. The movie includes a timeline of the administration’s reaction to the coronavirus throughout the film. This allows readers to delve deeper into the politics surrounding the current coronavirus situation.
Dates pop onto the screen to show readers just how slowly Trump acted. By comparing the United States’ timeline of events to those in other countries such as South Korea, the U.S. clearly fell behind. While the United States was stalled because of faulty test kits, the South Korean government utilized a national testing and tracing program to contain the virus.
The film has clips of President Trump making claims that directly contradict the words on the screen. For example, in one of the voice-overs, Trump talks about how nothing like this pandemic has ever occurred before in history, while an email from a group of scientists appears on the screen saying that this happened in 1918 with the Spanish flu pandemic.
Another interviewee, Rick Bright, the former director of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) said, “It’s not easy to come forward in this administration,” but he felt he had to come out to the public in opposition to drugs endorsed by Trump. He was then demoted.
There are interviews with Caroline Chen, a healthcare reporter, and Scott Becker, chief executive officer for the Association of Public Health Laboratories, that explain how testing was put on halt because the original test kit provided by the CDC had one faulty part. It was almost a month until the CDC finally announced the simple solution that all the scientists were begging to use but were prohibited to: simply avoid using the broken part.
There is also an interview with Michael Bowen, a former Trump supporter and executive vice president of one of America’s top N95 mask manufacturers, Prestige Ameritech. He continuously tried to warn different administrations about the N95 mask shortage but was ignored until it was too late.
Totally Under Control is amazing and eye-opening. It is the movie that has been anticipated ever since the United States entered quarantine. It explains the past few months step by step so that the audience can understand what has really been going on behind the scenes. The contrast between the United States and South Korea shows just how far the United States is lagging behind in the coronavirus rebound. This movie depicts the abnormality of the current state of the country. Totally Under Control, being a movie, makes it easy for audience members to think “it’s okay, it’s not real,” but it is.
This documentary forces audience members to reminisce on the past few months that they may have chosen to forget. As the aftereffects of Election Day are still prevalent, this documentary is a compelling alternative to the news.