We see these images and, all of a sudden, are now meant to cheer on Nya, Dmitri, and Isaiah to be our gladiators and participate in the very thing they’ve been fighting.

In the context of the film, they are exploited to enrage the audience. These moments are clear references to events like the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Charleston church shooting. We see scenes of policemen beating a black man to death in the middle of a baseball field, hired guns dressed as hooded Nazis riding through the streets, and white men waving white flags as they shoot up a church filled with black families. Are they going to be the gladiators fighting each other for everyone’s entertainment? The First Purge, in the end, is meant for the audience’s violent entertainment. Earlier in the film, a man from Dmitri’s neighborhood ponders about the NFFA turning Staten Island into its own Colosseum. The rest of the film’s politics are just as heavy-handed, but don’t seem to offer anything of substance. DeMonaco doesn’t mince words here: these marginalized people are “under siege from a government that doesn’t care” about them, as Dmitri declares during a rallying scene. One character, a wasting away druggie named Skeletor, is transformed into a meth-head take on Freddy Krueger with syringes strapped to the back of his hands. They are implanted with trackers and given a set of contact lenses that, while acting as surveillance cameras, give them a bestial look with glowing eyes. Each participant in The Purge is dehumanized into the lab rats of the NFFA, mirroring how people of color are dehumanized by the pennants of racism. That alone brings a chilling implication: if the NFFA’s goal was to decimate this population all along, it would seem that they ultimately succeed based on how the first Purge film focused on predominantly white characters in suburbia. The Purge films have always explored racial and societal tensions ever since Dwayne (later Dante) broke into the Sandins’ home in the original movie, and The First Purge taps a predominantly black and Latino cast. The main folks trying to survive the night this time around are Purge protestor Nya (Lex Scott Davis), her brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade), and her ex-boyfriend Dmitri (Y’lan Noel), the leader of a drug-dealing gang. Despite pushback, the government takes advantage of the low-income areas by offering thousands of dollars as an incentive to participate in The Purge. It starts with ground zero for the experiment, Staten Island. Updale (Marisa Tomei) came along with a psychological experiment on the human condition, the NFFA used it as a legal way to violently target impoverished and marginalized communities. The New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA), a clear parody of the Trump administration, rose to power through funding from the NRA and a diet of fear-mongering. A prequel for the Purge franchise, this fourth installment bears many of the familiar markings of a Purge movie, only now we learn how it all came to be. I’m not fully convinced there was much of a message to begin with beyond playing out a revenge fantasy on the Trump regime. Instead of re-contextualizing these moments or presenting a new argument, The First Purge veers so forcefully towards exploitation that its message gets lost among all the “F- you”s to the Trump administration.

There’s even an unmistakable joke on the “grab them by the p-y” controversy. Director Gerard McMurray and screenwriter James DeMonaco have directly lifted moments from the real world, including the rise of Trump, police brutalities, the Russian collusion investigation, and mass shootings.

The first purge