Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

As Kim’s faithful doctor/translator warns her, the adventurer’s adrenalin rush can be very addictive. You keep needing another fix. 

That’s the film’s central theme. What makes this film important is how that point works on the national political level as well as on the personal. 

The personal level is obvious. Kim (Tina Fey) is a TV news writer who risks a three-month assignment to report on camera from the Afghanistan war. Hooked by the thrills she grows increasingly foolhardy. In a domestic parallel, her lover back home starts sleeping around and. blames her for being absent.

Kim’s translator soon quits rather than risk widowing his new wife. The other journalists and cameramen experience the same rush that compels them to stay. Their every danger and thrill leave them craving another, bigger one. Their addiction drives them to betray each other, however close they may have drawn.

Only when Kim realizes that mortal danger has become her new normalcy — and sees its controlling, distracting effect on her Scottish lover — does she fly back to America. There she takes a high profile posting in NYC or Washington. There the drama is domesticated.

That dynamic also plays out on Kim’s network. The news department has a woman boss but she reads its needs the same way a swaggering man would. The network needs new stories, new locations, to hook the jaded audience. 

The key point is that a nation can also get hooked on war. The film is cross between MASH and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. 

Billy Bob Thornton plays a worldly marine officer who leaps at Kim’s plan for a filmed rescue of a kidnapped Scot (her lover, as it happens). The commander has practical considerations in mind — he needs a spectacular success to bolster his budget. But the thrill is the real draw. Like the politicos at home, the commander and Kim stay safely on base while the troops go out to risk their lives.    Kim’s visit to an interviewee who had both legs blown off underlines the human costs of the nation’s military glory.

In the context of the US presidential election, the film conveys the Democrat party’s reluctance to get America embroiled in yet another distant war, especially where the culture is so different as to be incomprehensible and the adventure of unlikely success. The producers include Fey and Lorne Michaels, also of Saturday Night Live. 

If Trump, Cruze and Rubio could think about what the film is saying they would be mightily offended. As is, they might well enjoy it. Except for the profane language, which Cruze and Rubio would loudly object to — and Trump would trump.