WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko
2023 · 11m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Dave Mullins
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, whimsical
Set in an alternate reality to the First World War, in which a senseless war is being fought, two soldiers on opposing sides play a joyful game of chess. A heroic carrier pigeon transmits the soldiers' chess moves across the battlefield as the fighting intensifies; neither soldier knows his opponent as the game and the war approach their climactic final move — whoever wins, one thing is certain: in war there are no winners.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mullins wraps a Lennon-McCartney platitude in whimsy and calls it subversion—the chess-game-during-war conceit is clever enough, but it doesn't interrogate anything; it just performs earnestness with a carrier pigeon. Competent satire for people who find irony exhausting.
A formally assured meditation on futility that channels the visual language of Melies and early war cinema while interrogating the Lennon-Yoko lexicon with genuine sophistication; the chess board becomes both intimate frame and metaphorical battlefield, executed with remarkable control across 11 minutes.
The decision to let the carrier pigeon become the narrative's true protagonist—the only being who sees the whole board—reframes the entire soldier relationship and transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely moving; that single structural choice is what makes this work.