You are left with mine and another titled unwatchable.

The story itself was ok, but the bad acting and production, combined with a music score that made no sense, made this movie very bad.

2.8.

I was hoping for some camp value here because the comparisons to "The Room," plus the very notion of a kind of veiled QAnon-y nutjob conspiracy thriller, did sound pretty hilarious. But this is too endlessly talky in a pedestrian and repetitive way--no matter that what the characters are talking about (however vaguely) is ridiculous--to be much fun. To their credit, the actors hired are professionals. They try to get through this with as much dignity and naturalism as possible, even as they're stuck in the script's Grade Z approximation of Ayn Rand for the disinformation age. But the writing and direction are just hopeless.

Who actually thought this material merited production? It's something your teacher (in a kind mood) might write "Good try! What imagination! B-" on, in a community college Creative Writing 101 course. It's the kind of terrible movie that sounds like it would surely be unintentional laugh riot, but is too much of an amateurish slog to actually sit through. So, only "So bad it's bad," not "good-bad." Too bad.

I will attempt to review this film as a film without entering any of the political angle of it just to give it an objective view.

Direction: excellent Acting: excellent Editing: excellent Story: excellent Cinematography: excellent

A movie like this, touching on a subject like this, before you watch it, you assume will be hackneyed, poorly directed, awkward, cringeworthy and ham-fisted. You *want* a movie which touches on these subjects to be well made, but you simply expect that it won't be.

In the very beginning I was a little confused as to the who and the what, and I thought it might devolve into a Neil Breen B-Movie mess. Then I was surprised. The story developed it all starts coming together in a really excellent way. Tracy Lucca is a fantastic director.

The "gaslighting" scene with the reporter from the larger paper is brilliantly written and acted and shot. The actor in that scene is excellent.

Props to everyone who made this and was in it.

The camera angles, the lighting, the acting especially is awesome.

Comparing it to a political set of films made on a low budget like the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, where some of it feels a little awkward and overdone, you expect that from the acting here. The casting was excellent.

The mood and the tone were awesome. The writing felt fresh and alive from the first real scenes in the newspaper office. The characters came to life.

I have to give huge props to Tracy Lucca and all of the talented actors and everyone else involved in this film. It proves low budget indie movies don't have to always be at the level of a shlocky splatterfest horror movie. They can be intriguing political thrillers that center on real things.

A character early on says something like, "Get ready for the rabbit hole." And they aren't lying.

I could compare it to a Charlie Sheen movie I recently saw from the 90s called "Shadow Conspiracy."

It had a big budget, starred Linda Hamilton, Donald Sutherland, Sam Waterston and had NONE of the brains of this movie. It was a political conspiracy thriller (Did you guess from the title?).

It had a few neat action pieces and some of the dumbest worst writing I've ever seen.

It probably had 1000x the budget of Dark State and 1000x worse script, worse directing, cheesy over the top bad acting.

The only difference was better cameras and more money.

Now, if you're someone who wants Avengers level visuals and editing and a big dumb story about nothing, you probably won't like this JUST because of how it *looks.*

If you're someone with a brain (however many there are left) that is willing to look past the limitations that come from working outside the (corrupt) Hollywood system, you will find an extremely well made Indie film with a good STORY that should hold your attention.

(and if you happen to be a truther of some kind, as you probably are if you watched this movie, it has plenty for you to sink your teeth into as well. But I mostly wanted to write this review to give major props to the people who made a really solid movie, as a movie lover first.)