The big news in June 2016 was the referendum in the United Kingdom asking voters whether they wanted the country to leave the European Union; the referendum commonly got called Brexit (short for British exit). The referendum passed, but lesser known was everything behind the campaign. Toby Haynes's "Brexit: The Uncivil War" focuses on this. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the strategist figuring out how to appeal to voters using algorithmic micro-targeting. It sounded very similar to how Trump and his cohorts sought to appeal to voters in the US. After the vote, it turned out that large numbers of British citizens didn't even understand what the referendum was about. Indeed, the movie shows the Leave campaign trying to manipulate people into thinking that the problem is foreigners coming to England. The UK and US sure have a lot in common.

It's not a great movie, but gives a good insight into what led British voters to vote against their own interest (not that the EU is anything to worship). Maybe so many UK voters have lost faith in their government that they don't care what happens. I recommend the movie.

As to the idea that foreigners move to England and exploit its benefits, John Oliver has made quite a few jokes about how his native country has a sketchy history when it comes to race relations.

The film centers on Dominic Cummings, a classic Cumberbatch character: very intelligent, socially awkward, not suffering of and insulting to fools, embarking on something like strategizing the Leave campaign mostly as an intellectual exercise. We learn how modern technology, mainly social media analytics, helped empower people who had abandoned the idea of voting and were ignored by all political sides. We see how from the data scientist perspective, using these tools to cause Great Britain to split from Europe was just a concept test, with a much larger prize as a target. That's the illuminating part.

The imperfect part is that the narrative of the film is clearly a remainer one, with leavers depicted as hapless grobians and remainers as rational decent empathetic (and attractive) people. It doesn't try to understand the other side at all, leaving that job to the algorithms depicted in the film. I also question the release of the film way before the fat lady finished her song on Brexit. As such it feels spiteful: "we lost, but they had Sherlock Holmes as strategy manager and magical algorithms that manipulate a sea of fools". I don't like fools either and I think Britain leaving the EU is idiotic, but even so the film felt condescending to me.

However, the movie is not bad and it asks (or rather induces the viewer to ask) some important questions about the future of decision making. It still falls into the category of seeing mass social manipulation as an accident, as something people do not want, when in fact all evidence points to the contrary: people post everything they know and feel so that the embracing system will give them exactly what they want. They want to be manipulated to feel better than if they were rational and not lying to themselves. For this kind of people, a movie like Brexit will not function as a warning, but as validation. It is for this reason that I rated the film a failure. It is clear what it wanted to do, but just as the well meant remainer campaign in the movie, it falls on deaf ears.

Very well portrayed, with a strong actor cast, concise and to the point!

Must watch for anybody in the UK, Europe and US given the current political situation across the globe!