Netflix: In the Shadow of the Moon, a Review

To kick this off, I’d like to rip off a sentence from O. Henry:

“It looked like a good thing but wait till I tell you.”

A few days ago, I watched a movie on Netflix called In the Shadow of the Moon. The movie started strong. A bus driver, a classical pianist and a short order cook in different parts of a city (but in rapid succession) inexplicably begin bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The cook falls dead on his grill; the second, on his piano, and the third, falls dead and crashes her bus—all three have their brains turned to mush; all three with a triangular pattern of puncture wounds on their necks. What. The. Hell!

The first clue was laying in front of the wrecked bus, covered in broken glass—a copy of Thomas Jefferson: American Patriot by David Layton. Ok, that’s a fake book, but the bus driver was reading it. I was intrigued, and I settled in for more. The deaths of those three (plus one other) were perpetrated by a black woman in a blue hoodie, but she vanished, and the murders remained unsolved.

About a decade later, another set of deaths occur in exactly the same way. One of the victims is a university professor, and what do we find on his desk, covered in blood and gore?

A book entitled Andrew Jackson: Frontier Life. Well, that’s another fake book, but a pattern has formed. These murder victims are apparently people like me—avid readers of American History. What the hell is going on, right?

The movie progresses by another decade. The main protagonist, at the start of the film, was a beat cop; then, in the middle, a detective; by the end, a worn out has-been who is thought crazy since stating his belief that the murderer is a time traveler who comes back ever 9 years (cycles of the blood moon) to go on a killing spree.

He tracks down someone who had actually died earlier in the movie, but, at the time, it was not realized that he was one of the three-dots-on-the-neck-brain-emulsification victims. As he walks into the deceased’s former residence, we see American flags on the TV and by the door.

At this point, we find out that in life he was a right-wing nut who wrote some incendiary ideas that ultimately brought the USA to a new civil war. In a flashback sequence, his typewriter is surrounded by books about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Roosevelt and Eisenhower.

Apparently, at some point in the future, the ability to time travel was developed, and the black lady in the blue hoodie volunteered to be sent back to wipe out the key people who started this movement so that the new civil war, which is far more devastating than the first one, can be stopped before it ever starts.

Ok, now, that’s a good solid story. The movie is very well edited, and the pace is just right—in my opinion, of course. But here’s what irritates me, and what I expect will irritate you. These exceedingly wicked people who needed to be destroyed at all costs were not reading Mein Kampf. They were not reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They were not reading the Communist Manifesto.

They were reading books about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and this reading list somehow inspired them to be right-wing, white supremacists who would lead the whole country into the abyss of another civil war.

The message being sent by this Netflix movie is clear—people who read American history, people who are patriotic, people who hold our founding documents and our flag sacred are fascist, right-wing, white supremacists who need—in the words of the movie—“to be silenced.”

I have cancelled my Netflix subscription.