The Order

Movie Review

Something’s rotten in the state of Idaho.

FBI Agent Terry Husk can see that when he arrives at the FBI’s oft-unused field office in Coeur d’Alene. He can feel it. He sees the fliers taped to saloon walls, proclaiming “white power.” He reads it in the police reports: a bank robbery here, the bombing of a porn theater there.

Disconnected? Maybe. Probably.

But then a local cop, Jamie Bowen, tells him about a strange conversation he had with one of his old high school chums, Walter, who had slipped into the local white supremacy movement. The guy was drunk, and he showed Jamie a counterfeit bill. Hinted at his involvement at a bank robbery and more. “This is only the beginning,” Walt said.

That was the last time Jamie saw Walt. He’s been missing for two weeks.

Interesting, Terry admits. And the Aryan Nations—led by the spiritual godfather of the white separatist movement, Richard Butler—is located nearby. But bank robberies? Bombings? Counterfeit rings? Doesn’t sound like any white supremacy movement he’s ever heard of.

“In my experience, hate groups don’t rob banks,” Terry tells Jamie.

“What if it’s different this time?” Jamie says.

It is different this time. What the outside world might see as disconnected acts of crime, the charismatic white supremacist Bob Mathews sees as the beginning of a race war. Step by step, act by act, he’s building his own organization. He calls it The Order. And if he has his way, The Order will spark a full-blown civil war.

Positive Elements

The Order (which is based on a true story) takes the form of a cat-and-mouse narrative between Terry and Bob, and sometimes it’s hard to pin down who’s the cat and who’s the mouse. And certainly, we can praise Terry’s commitment to tracking down Bob and his network of law-breaking supremacists before they trigger that race war they so long for.

But Terry can be kind of a jerk, too. And that means the award for the nicest, most principled guy in The Order (the movie, of course, not the group) probably goes to Jamie. He’s a home-grown Idahoan, and he knows some of the folks they’re going after. But he’s just as determined—if not more so—to serving the law and saving lives. And he reminds Terry that not everyone in the community was “born under a sheet.”

Spiritual Elements

The white supremacy movement on display in The Order is often cloaked under the guise of Christianity. And many of its adherents indeed seem to believe that their race war is condoned by God.

Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations group, also serves as its minister. He tells Terry and Jamie that his church is open to all “white men.” And at a gathering of white supremacists, he takes the stage in the guise of a Christian shepherd leading his flock.

“This book holds our birthright,” he says, waving a Bible. “The promised land is not for the Jews, but for the true Israelites—the Caucasians.” And he’s about to have his congregation turn to the book of Zecheriah when he’s interrupted.

Bob Mathews also prays and invokes God in his speeches: “With our blood, and His will, let [this country] become the land of our children to be,” he says to his henchmen. “May God protect us.” Some of the white supremacy symbols we see incorporate nods to Christianity, and someone burns a cross in the middle of a white supremacist compound.

We hear plenty of antisemitic language throughout the film. And when The Order decides to start assassinating people, its first target is Denver radio host Alan Berg (an atheist of Jewish descent). In one of the movie’s first scenes, we hear Berg mock one of his conservative religious callers, asking if Christians use Christ’s blood as “gravy.”

“You know what my problem is with every fanatic fundamentalist, from the Catholics, to the Orthodox, to the KKK?” Berg says. “The one thing you all have in common and you’re too ignorant to see it, is you’re too inept to get by in the world. So your only recourse is to try to curtail the entertainment of others.” Later in the film, a caller tells Berg that “the only real good Jew is a dead Jew.” We hear that an explosive device went off in a Jewish synagogue.

Sexual & Romantic Content

A member of The Order hangs out in an adult movie theater (in order to leave an explosive there). We see some exposed breasts and sexual movements briefly on the theater’s movie screen.

Bob Mathews is married to a woman named Debbie. They met through a classified ad (“about a hundred women responded, but out of all of them, he chose me,” Debbie says), and they adopted a son. They kiss affectionately.

But Bob also had a mistress, Zillah, and he fathered a daughter through her. (When the girl is born, Zillah apologizes that she wasn’t a boy.) Bob cuddles with Zillah; when Debbie confronts Bob over his affair, he doesn’t deny it—but he promises Debbie, “You have nothing to worry about.”

We see Terry shirtless and in his underwear. Another man is seen shirtless, too.

Violent Content

The movie opens with the murder of Jamie’s loose-lipped informant, Walt. The unsuspecting man is led into the woods, shot in the back, and then finished off with several more bullets. “Well, that shut him up,” one of his killers says, as blood wells up in Walt’s mouth. Later, his body is found in a shallow, muddy grave.

Alan Berg is also shot several times and left to die in his driveway. “They butchered him like he was a f—ing animal,” an FBI agent says. Two other men are killed as well: One is shot in the chest and falls down, bleeding messily out as someone unsuccessfully tries to save him. Another is killed in a fiery inferno.

The Order had hoped to kill plenty more people had their plans come to full fruition. Following a six-step template outlined in a white supremacist novel, their plans include wide-scale assassination and “the day of the rope,” wherein the full-fledged race war begins.

An explosion rips through an adult movie theater (knocking down at least one passing pedestrian). A couple of people are injured in a bank robbery (one is hit with the butt of a gun, and we see some blood on their faces and shirts), and plenty of people are scared to death by the guns being brandished in their faces.

Order members rob armored vehicles, too: Shots are fired into the vehicles to encourage compliance. A few sets of tires are blown out, and a spiked strip is thrown across a highway to disable pursuing police cars. A dye packet blows up, splashing Bob and other members with red. (The scene is also designed to fool moviegoers into thinking someone was shot.)

Bob teaches his son how to shoot. Terry goes hunting—and he’s nearly hunted in turn. He bears a wicked-looking scar on his chest, suggesting he had open-heart surgery at one point. His nose regularly bleeds, too. Someone says Berg “needs a couple of barrels in his mouth.” Several people are threatened with guns. We hear about how the victim in one of Terry’s previous cases was found dismembered—or at least parts of her were.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear at least 90 f-words, nearly 20 s-words and see one printed use of the n-word. We also hear a harsh slang reference to a sexual act, as well as uses of “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “pr–k” and several racial and ethnic slurs. God’s name is misused four times, twice with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug & Alcohol Content

The movie suggests that Terry has had open-heart surgery, but that hasn’t stopped him from smoking cigarettes—and smoking them with some regularity. (Other characters smoke, too.) He also complains that his heart medication makes his nose bleed.

Terry and nearly every other character here drink beer. He orders a shot of whiskey for both himself and Jamie. We hear that a missing man is “a drunk.” Jamie drinks from a flask.

Other Noteworthy Elements

The Order, both the white supremacist organization and the movie itself, are both littered with racist thought, talk and imagery. We see Nazi swastikas, Aryan Nations flags and other racist symbols. White-power fliers proclaim: “United together, we can have a white nation with a future.” One wall in The Order’s hangout depicts future assassination targets, often further marred by racial slurs or images.

But The Order is also printing counterfeit currency, too—an act that apparently put them on the wrong side of even the Aryan Nations. (The group was apparently using the Nations’ printing presses to print that counterfeit cash.)

Characters lie to and mislead authorities. Someone throws up from smoke inhalation.

Conclusion

In his last words over Denver’s radio airwaves, the doomed Alan Berg sounds surprisingly conciliatory for such a notorious gadfly.

“When you hear (angry, threatening callers) all day, you might think we’re so filled with hate,” Berg says. “I think people are actually decent. That’s why they call in. They want to talk. … I think our better instincts will prevail. But it’s got to start somewhere.”

Berg, being an atheist, didn’t have the worldview that Christians might: that people aren’t actually decent. Sure, we can follow our better instincts. Often, hopefully, we do. But we are fallen creatures. And, apart from God, we slip further from His perfect design for us time after time.

And even when we say that we follow God, we still slip. And the fall is that much greater.

The Order shows us just how tragically, how horrifically, how far that fall can be. How evil can wrap itself in a flag, carry a cross and convince itself of its goodness, if no one else.

But, of course, most historical dramas are made in part to reflect a director’s take on current events, and The Order is no different.

Australian director Justin Kurzel told Entertainment Weekly that the Jan. 6 demonstrations/riots in Washington D.C. had a profound impact on The Order. “I remember seeing images of nooses hanging outside the Capitol Building as props and finding real similarities to a particular chapter in [the book the real Bob Mathews drew inspiration from] called ‘Day of the Rope’ that was describing and reenacting these politicians being hung outside the building,” Kurzel said. “There were just so many similarities to what was going on within this incredible script Zach [Baylin] had written that I just found it so compelling and wanted to find a way into it that I felt could be a wonderful first American film.”

Setting aside that contemporary subtext, The Order comes with more overt issues. The violence, while not salacious, is not to be overlooked. The racial vitriol is truly vile. And nearly 100 f-words? Yeah, that’s a lot.

The Order gives us a look at a scary group that did some horrific things. But it contains its own sorts of horrors as well. This is not a comfortable world.