The Brink Of War opens on Reagan’s back as he gazes out on rough seas. His trench coat flaps in the wind like a cape, giving him the resolved, fortified appearance of a superhero surveying the chaos he must order. The waters are deep, the metaphor is shallow. He is President Reagan (Jeff Daniels), “The Crusader,” warrior for the right of people everywhere to come to America. Unafraid to dig in his heels and flare his nostrils for God and country, he is a steadfast bull who really wants to militarize space. He’s come to Iceland with his trusted aide, George Shultz (J.K. Simmons), to meet with the new General Secretary Of The Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris), and decide whether there will be war or peace. The Gipper is going to have to win one for himself this time.

The last decade has seen three major adaptations of Reagan’s Wikipedia page, and The Brink Of War is by far the dullest. While Killing Reagan (2016) and Reagan (2024) share many of the same pathologies as Brink Of War, they at least attempt to tell the story of a human being, because they engage with his assassination attempt and later mental decline. Michael Russell Gunn’s Cold War-era Angel Studios drama instead presents a grumpy monolith chiseled from Churchill’s mold.

Unlike Young Washington in this year’s other Angel Studios presidential biopic, Reagan does not come into his mythic glory or claim his destiny during the course of this film. He’s already there, and he will not waver. Not only is the Reykjavik Summit already almost over when Brink Of War begins, but as Reagan turns to face the camera, the character is nearing his end as well. In 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev met, Reagan had already survived Iran-Contra and an assassination attempt. One little communist who calls himself a “secretary” shouldn’t be an issue. This is a man with an immovable sense of righteousness; if Nancy’s astrologer is correct, even the stars favor him. 

So unchanging is this character in The Brink Of War that nearly every scene repeats, with only new terms being discussed. Reagan offers a strong-armed solution; Gorbachev pushes back. Reagan gets on his soapbox about a limited kind of individual “freedom.” They wrestle in whataboutery. Gorbachev sees “the light,” Reagan wins the volley. Someone says “trust but verify.” Everyone leaves the table and goes to a different table. 

But when the film isn’t simply uninteresting, it’s nauseating. It becomes a sideshow performance of necrophilic ventriloquism in which Gunn shoves his hand up Reagan’s ass and brings him back to life with zombified conservative talking points. “We are a nation of immigrants,” Daniels’ Reagan warbles without a hint of irony. Following his logic, because Americans all come from somewhere else but still retain “national-spiritual ties” to their cultures of origin, they have an interest (a military interest, in fact) in the security of those countries. Ergo, America should be the benevolent world police. Reagan’s conclusion that America cares “deeply about immigrants and their families” is the only laugh of the film. The film may close with a Bible quote saying “blessed are the peacemakers,” but the Christian connection short circuits when you advocate for peace behind a space missile. 

It’s flawed, circuitous logic that rings completely hollow, but it’s not unexpected. While overwrought political dialogue and unearned gravitas aren’t flaws specific to this film or conservative cinema, these are flaws increasingly prominent in American film culture. It’s easy and not entirely incorrect to brush off this or any other Angel Studios release as redundant and boring. But in the short five years since it became a “values-based” studio, the crowd-funded production company has quickly marched from making mundane moralist genre films straight into nonbiodegradable nationalist fare. The recent run of Animal Farm, Young Washington, and Brink Of War follows a nearly textbook trajectory of historical fascist cinema. 

Animal Farm reformulates a fable to fit into the dominant economic and political ideologies (capitalism good, communism bad, farts are freedom). Then Young Washington uses the frontier action genre to retread the national founding story. This gives way to Brink Of War, in which a “glorious” and deceased father-figure is rendered into a superhuman effigy, resurrected to speak to the current moment. The film isn’t about the Cold War or the nuanced chess game of international politics. If it were, Gunn would provide more visual context to illustrate the enormity of the situation instead of a few impersonal bullet points at the start. His film instead assumes you have a blind adoration for Reagan that imports weight to everything the president does.

In the past, fascist cinema has been state-funded with an intense focus on moving the masses—often by framing political leaders as larger-than-life, godlike figures—and inspiring popular participation. The people and their nationalist spirit were directly addressed in the frame. Now the films are crowd-funded, the people moved behind the camera and reduced to their pocketbooks. Angel Studios covers a good deal of its production costs through user subscriptions. Folks are invited to contribute to a tiered system of giving that promises insight into Angel’s boardroom decisions (though unless you’re paying $20 a month, you’ll also have to pay the additional cost of a ticket to a movie you supposedly helped finance). 

If this feels too impersonal, Angel Studios has a “Pay It Forward” option that transubstantiates consumer spending into evangelism, allowing viewers—or investors, especially when they’re the same thing—to skirt the traditional box office process and pay for someone else to see the film. “If you believe more people should see what happens when leaders choose dialogue over destruction, join me, scan the QR code, pay it forward, help the story reach someone else,” Daniels dutifully reads from a teleprompter at the end of Brink Of War. 

Angel is outsourcing the propaganda to the very people it wants to propagandize, and since the audience’s allegiance is already assumed, Angel’s movies address absolutely no one, or speak exclusively to an audience of foregone conclusions. Who else is Charlie Kirk: American Martyr reaching? Sometimes, the company even bends completed films further rightward through rebranding and marketing campaigns. After a historically conservative run, it’s clear that Angel Studios and its crowdfunded filmmaking don’t actually care about dialogue and people; they care about myths and cash.