Four Hours at the Capitol Review
This documentary was something I wanted to watch the second I saw it on Netflix and thankfully it didn’t disappoint. While some of the far right members tried to come across as your average Joe, actually delving more into their background while watching the documentary showed just how bigoted they really are, despite how they were perceived in the documentary.
Four Hours at the Capitol documents the four hours that Trump supporters tried to take hold of the Capitol in America during the election. During these four hours multiple people died including Trump supporters and the police and many more were injured and traumatised by the event. I can’t imagine what must’ve been going through those police men and women’s minds seeing all these crazy people coming for them and not knowing who’s carrying a firearm and whether they’re going to live to see the end of it.
In this documentary we get to see both sides of the coin, we talk to supporters of Trump, the ones that stormed the Capitol as well as the service men and women that were trying to defend it. As well as a lot of the government officials who were in the building at the time that all this was going down and how scary that situation was for them.
As I said at the start of this review some of the people who joined in on storming the Capitol came across in the documentary as activists or reporters or independent filmographers, but when you actually searched who they worked for on Google most of them were still far right supporters that probably would’ve stormed the Capitol anyway, and were using their job titles as a scapegoat to seem less connected to the other peoples’ beliefs. This really shows you that even in a documentary you have to make sure that you understand who your sources are, because you could easily be just a reporter for this newspaper I’ve never heard of, but that newspaper is rife with fake news and conspiracy.
The scariest part of all of this was it was the president at the time, Donald Trump, who was advocating for this sort of situation to happen. He was the one that had indoctrinated all these men and women and he was the one that was cheering them on, even silently, to do what they were doing. You could say he wasn’t cheering them on, but he was, by not telling them to stop or to disband and only at the end of those four hours when Trump finally sent out a video on Twitter telling them to go home did they actually listen. It’s terrifying how easy people can be indoctrinated into a cult mentality and follow their leader blindly, even when what their leader is calling for could cost people their lives.
This is an absolutely brilliant documentary with a lot of the footage being directly from the storming of the Capitol, from the body cams of the police people as well as found footage from the Trump supporters. It gave you a brilliant timeline of events and it really showed how when you push a small minority to the edge they will do unspeakable things to try and get their way. While these people do have very large voices in what they were doing we have to remember that they are the minority and most people are much more contained and understanding than these people that thought that they could take over the Capitol.
I do hope that things like this don’t happen again or at least if they do they are for the right reasons. In this situation the Trump supporters thought that Trump had won his presidency again for another four years however he hadn’t, and they were coming up with a conspiracy that votes had been tampered with to make sure that he didn’t win. We know that this is not true but when you’re so stuck in a cultist mentality it’s very hard to see the wood for the trees and so, if it was to happen again I hope it would be under honest and truthful reasons rather than a load of people thinking that their leader should’ve won the election despite the obvious truth that he did not.
What did you think of the documentary?
Until next time.
Moving Picture Review 