Steven Spielberg’s latest bad movie attempts to recapture the emotional drama surrounding the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers. One might imagine that the film would highlight the challenges and consequences faced by Daniel Ellsberg in ferrying the documents out of the realm of government classified restrictions, or the efforts of the New York Times in bringing these astonishing documents to the public. Instead, the crux of the film is curiously focused on the Washington Post, which was late to reporting the story but wound up picking up the publication of the Pentagon Papers’ contents after the Nixon White House threw temporary legal obstacles in the Times’ path.
