HBO's Exterminate All the Brutes is a radical masterpiece

TIME

I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck's experimental four-part documentary that takes on the unwieldy, bitterly contentious subject of white supremacy since the so-called Age of Discovery "might sound like the recipe for something dry and detached," says Judy Berman. "But there is a core of human warmth to the series—not least in the way Peck, who acts as a first-person narrator, describes his relationships with the writers who influenced it... Perhaps because of the diversity of his influences, as well as his own international background, Peck has little use for the pieties, buzzwords or individual villains of siloed social justice debates. Worn-out terms like problematic and cancel culture feel inadequate to the topics at hand. And so Brutes makes identity-based movements with no grounding in hundreds of years of global history look a bit provincial. Its point is not to rail against the Donald Trumps, or even the Adolf Hitlers, so much as it is to render visible the architecture of oppression that makes the rise of demagogues inevitable. While the series concentrates most on the U.S. and its original sins—the long, slow genocide of Indigenous peoples as well as chattel slavery—it is really a non-chronological, revisionist history of the West since the Crusades."

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• Exterminate All the Brutes is unrelenting in its critique, but it’s also more muted in tone than that title might suggest: "Peck’s slightly droning narration contributes to that effect, as does an approach that’s more free-associative than truly essayistic," says Mike Hale. "There’s also, unfortunately, the documentary’s tendency to cycle through and circle around a relatively small set of ideas that would have had more force in a shorter film. If Exterminate All the Brutes is never boring, it’s less because Peck — whose James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, was an Oscar nominee in 2017 — always gives you something new to think about than because he always gives you something new to look at."
• This is a project whose poetry and its ability to look into the heart of human darkness feel linked: "Rather than referencing the present moment to a fault, Peck is working on a grand scale and a sort of geologic time, measuring our history in acts of cruelty," says Daniel D'Addario. "He does so with a visual imagination and an unblinking-ness that will leave those viewers who are up for the challenge dazzled and, perhaps, changed."
• Exterminate All the Brutes is a dense collage of ideas, words and images that doesn’t mind circling back to a previously made point: "Were it on the page, rather than the screen, you might marvel at its audacity while at the same time wishing for a tighter edit," says Chris Vognar. "It moves, thanks largely to the savvy media criticism provided by the movie clips, but it’s in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere. Then again, it does cover hundreds of years of colonization, subjugation and extermination. That can take a while, and it can also make you feel every single one of those four hours...If anything, the results play out as a little too personal: The narration, fiercely intellectual, seems to cover every second of film, and the scripted sequences often feel like they belong to another movie. None of which stops Exterminate All the Brutes from being a unique, blood-soaked history lesson we’d all do well to heed."
• The sharpest element in Exterminate All the Brutes is how Peck bewitches reenactments through detailed staging, only to juxtapose them with fictionalizations: "In Part 2, 'Who the F*** Is Columbus?,' he imagines the Indigenous population murdering Columbus and his villainous comrades on Haiti’s pictureseque beaches," says Robert Daniels. "In another fascinating maneuver set in 1892, a Black missionary on the Congo River witnesses African overseers parading chained white slaves through the jungle. Another finds Frederic W. Farrar in 1866 London as he presents Social Darwinism and the feebleness of 'lower' races to a diverse gallery of disgusted modern onlookers. It’s wish fulfillment that provides catharsis to the oppressed, and alternative timelines that serve as mirrors held up to tyrants. A stoic Josh Hartnett figures in all of these timelines. He’s General Thomas Sydney Jesup inciting a massacre against the Seminoles and Maroons in 1863 Florida, and the murderous head of a rubber plantation. Exterminate All the Brutes can be highly visceral in depicting these slaughters as they render bloody scalpings and bullets loudly shot through skulls. These sharp reenactments also expose the weakness of the series’ generic animation used to recount the Trail of Tears and the Middle Passage."
• Raoul Peck calls Exterminate All the Brutes "a film about today": "It's not looking back at 600 years of history," he says. "I thought this should be a very heavy blow to a certain view of history, and American history in particular. In fact, it was not, because the monster has so many different heads, and numerous other heads are popping up every day. The confusion and the cacophony are so great, it's hard to address just one. It took me a few months to wrap my head around it. I had to dig deeper. I had to go beyond and draw a bigger canvas and go further back to understand where all this began. The most pregnant racist ideology developed in the 19th century, which is yesterday. It's not 800 years ago."
• Exterminate All the Brutes originated in 2017 when then-HBO chairman Richard Plepler "cursed" Peck for "10 minutes" for not bringing I Am Not Your Negro to his network: Plepler then offered him carte blanche for his next project. “We’d been working on several film ideas, both documentary and feature film,” said Rémi Grellety, Peck’s producer for the past 13 years. “And Raoul said, ‘Let’s bring Richard the toughest idea.’” The film, they told Plepler in a two-page pitch, would be based on the historian Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book Exterminate All the Brutes, a mix of history and travelogue that used Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness as a jumping off point to trace Europe’s racist past in Africa.