Laura Bennett is unimpressed by Vice magazine’s new HBO show of the same name:
“Vice” mostly peddles an aggressive nihilism, an undifferentiated stream of brutal images and events. By the second episode, all the gunshots and explosions have begun to sound as phony and rote as special effects. The thinness of context makes the trauma feel mostly atmospheric, all this highly specific misery and atrocity blending into a single panorama of carnage. War becomes a series of assaultive clips and soundbites, the sum reduced to its parts. So the world is screwed, the government is corrupt, war is a desolate waste. Child soldiers, enslaved sex workers, a cross-dressing basketball star befriending a heinous dictator: It is all sad and mystifying and strange.
Willa Paskin’s view:
Despite showing some very gruesome imagery— a real decapitated head, for example— and having a swaggy, “we’re so hip we send our reporters into dangerous places looking like they just rolled out of bed” self-aggrandizement, “Vice” is fundamentally earnest: war is terrible, these situations are totally effed up, American foreign policy positions are generally right. The series, according to the voice-over that plays at the beginning, is out to expose the “absurdity of the modern condition,” but it doesn’t really fixate on the “absurdity,” or not much more than any news outlet sending dispatches from dangerous places.
Marah Eakin adds:
Serious journalists had been in Pakistan, Angola, and North Korea for years, so what made Vice think that because it sent some tattooed kids wearing jeans to a war torn area that it was reporting serious news and not just promoting “what the fuck” tourism. With [“Vice”], that question looms large and is never really answered.
The Dish 