Bombshell is tense, and deserving of high praise for exposing a work place at Fox News that’s toxic and extremely harmful. Upon the first few minutes I was thinking this is an extremely white film, but then I remembered that I was watching a movie about Fox News.
The three leads are Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, and Margot Robbie as Kayla Pospisil (A Fictional Character). All three of them do an amazing job, but Charlize Theron literally transforms into Kelly and is the standout.
One problem I had about the movie was that they really try to make Kelley likeable and that’s not something I’m fond of. I do understand that in this situation she is in no way the villain, but they could’ve at least outlined the horrible things she’s done and said.
All of that being said the movie is a great tale about how women in the workplace feel, what they have to deal with, and how Fox News really created an environment for these behaviors to thrive in. Kidman, Theron, and Robbie all make us really believe the trauma so many women felt at the network.
Bombshell is an incredibly important film because it not only deals with such heavy material brilliantly, but the way it shows the women characters is fantastic. In no way do I think that far right republicans and Fox News should be normalized or celebrated, but to me that wasn’t the story Bombshell was trying to tell.
All of the racism, and hate that is Fox News is real but is only background noise to the bigger story of sexual assault being told in this film. No woman deserves to be treated this way just because of their gender. That’s what this movie details so beautifully.
They’re able to show us that women have to deal with so many different things in the workspace that put them down. We can see all of this played out on screen and Margot Robbie delivers one of the most heartbreaking and uncomfortable scenes in the movie.
Bombshell has so many tense moments that just make you squirm with the hyper realism. These moments make you feel every inch of them and that’s credit to the writing and acting. You never feel something like like that never happened, and was truly sad to see and know that it did happen. The movie really details dangerous men and toxic work environments where women are not respected and are just seen as objects.
Theron, Kidman, and Robbie show us competent professional women that don’t seem whiney or that they don’t know what they’re doing. And while their characters are terrible people in real life, the way they were able to tell their stories and take down a monster in Roger Ailes was really special, and as I said earlier no one deserves what happened to these women.
Bombshell is by no means a perfect movie and I really don’t like the fact that Kelly is normalized, but the story is an important detail of toxic work environments and how we can just brush things under the rug. Fox News’ dirty laundry needs to be aired and this movie is a step in the right direction, we can’t allow behavior like this to keep happening and seeing these stories on the big screen allows them to be told on a massive scale. Fox News is leading the way in false information/hate, and now we have a brilliant movie about the blatant sexual harassment that goes on there.
I give Bombshell an A-
