Agents of Chaos

Agents of Chaos dispels enough smoke to give viewers a clearer picture than most will have seen before of what our country is facing. It isn’t always artful. The reenactments can be silly. But as a work of investigative and explanatory journalism built to penetrate the same left-vs.-right media bubbles it laments, Gibney’s documentary is a revelation.

Agents of Chaos, is not for the weak of stomach. ... Fortunately, he knows how to lighten the load. Imagine a four-hour Frontline investigation with a sense of humor and a rock-and-roll soundtrack — that’s Agents of Chaos in a nutshell.

It’s wearing and exhausting to go over all this again. But that’s nothing, the film suggests, to how alarming we should be that millions of our fellow citizens don’t look at Russia today with revulsion and fear — that they and we and Trump are remaking our democracy in Russia’s corrupt, autocratic image.

Director Alex Gibney's two-part documentary is especially notable for its nuance, offering multiple angles exploring what transpired as well as the disparate motivations of those involved.

While Agents of Chaos may not come to any concrete conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election, it makes a pretty damning case that the Russians definitely had some influence, and that US intelligence officials were slow on the uptake in fighting it.

There are reasons to sit down and carefully watch Agents of Chaos. A refresher course on all dubious international activities starting from 2014 Crimean Crisis onward never hurt anyone for civic responsibility’s sake. But an argument to reach for this documentary for a highlight reel of Russian/Trump crimes seems weak—grab a newspaper.

The result is a dizzying, overwhelming, yet compelling presentation of the different tactics the Russians employed. There is an effort to divide each aspect of Russian interference into easily digestible bites, but it proves to be an extremely difficult feat because of how convoluted it actually was. It’s a documentary that demands you actively engage with its content in order to keep track of every thread.

It's interesting and involving to watch the filmmaker's mind at work even at an arduous running time of four cumulative hours. But Agents of Chaos may not move anybody's understanding beyond that "uncertainty," and if your instinct is to prefer decisive perspectives or answers, this may not be satisfying.