It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are only a few great films about international politics. The best of them, like “The Godfather,” are more allegorical than literal. Despite the high stakes, few filmmakers know how to make global tensions palpable to most viewers. There are exceptions, of course. “Dr. Strangelove” is a classic, as is “The Hunt for Red October.” Since the end of the Cold War, however, most films that attempt to portray important IR themes usually fall well short.
Unfortunately, the newly released “G20,” starring Oscar-winning luminary Viola Davis, is no exception to this rule. Davis plays Danielle Sutton, the U.S. president and Army veteran, who travels to Cape Town, South Africa, for the Group of Twenty summit that gives the film its name. There she plans to secure an agreement for her ambitious plan to use a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, to end global poverty. But nefarious villains converging on the G20 summit have other ideas.
The plot of “G20” could best be summarized as “Die Hard,” but at a global summit—the kind of absurd movie premise in which the U.S. president’s biggest headache is neither international diplomacy nor domestic politics, but a rebellious teenage daughter. Unsurprisingly, the reviews have been pretty mediocre, with one critic asking flat-out, “Is there value in trash like G20?”
IR scholarship provides a surprising answer to this question: Yes.
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There are several reasons for this. First, films about foreign policy—even schlocky ones—possess some explanatory value. And as multiple scholars have noted, genre films can also shape how ordinary citizens think about world politics. This is because when people first hear about something happening in the world, they employ analogical reasoning to connect the new developments with known examples from the past. Usually, the past examples are drawn from real-world history, but they can also be drawn from the “synthetic experiences” of fictional narratives as well. In other words, for better and worse, for a mass public largely uninterested in world politics, bad action flicks can be a source of information that forms and informs their worldview.
So what are the thematic takeaways from the “G20”? The most obvious point is that we are all living in an incredibly low-trust environment.
Second, precisely because of its pedestrian, by-the-numbers plot, an unoriginal action movie like “G20” provides a window into what Hollywood screenwriters think are the lowest common denominators in popular conceptions of contemporary world politics. So even if very few people watch “G20,” the same tropes that appeared in it will in all likelihood recur in other bad actions films about international relations. That means they provide IR scholars with a window into the public’s foreign policy mindset.
So what are the thematic takeaways from the “G20”? The most obvious point is that we are all living in an incredibly low-trust environment. After taking the G20 leaders hostage, the film’s villains record them speaking in order to create deepfake videos in which the heads of government seem corrupt and interested primarily in surveilling their citizens, extracting national wealth and preserving their power. As the videos are released, markets begin to crash, despite mainstream media warnings that they are deepfakes. As Clark Gregg, playing U.S. Vice President Harold Moseley, helpfully explains, the deepfake videos are damning because we live “in a world where disinformation is more powerful than information.” Unsurprisingly, part of the villainous plot is encouraging people across the world to buy cryptocurrencies because, unlike CBDCs, they are not controlled by national governments.
Lack of trust in institutions and authority is a well-known phenomenon in the U.S., but it is actually a worldwide trend that is fueled by grievance. As the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer recently reported, “Sixty-one percent globally have a moderate or high sense of grievance, which is defined by a belief that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system.” Edelman found that respondents with a high degree of grievance expressed the lowest trust in governments. The premise of “G20”—that fake news would cause markets to gyrate—seems all too plausible in a world in which a bogus claim that real-life U.S. President Trump would pause his “reciprocal” tariffs had a similar effect on stock markets earlier this month. Days later, of course, Trump went on to do just that.
The film also suggests a slightly surprising Patient Zero behind the global epidemic of distrust: the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In “G20,” Sutton’s backstory as an Army veteran is key to her political career, which was launched by a Time magazine cover photo of her rescuing an Iraqi child during the battle of Fallujah. In one monologue, however, Sutton expresses bittersweet feelings about the cover shot, noting that it omitted the horrors that preceded it. Furthermore, we learn that the Iraq war is also the origin story for Anthony Starr’s character, Edward Rutledge, the chief villain and former Australian special forces soldier who was also deployed to Fallujah, where he lost several friends in the fighting. The one scene in “G20” that has any real juice to it is when Rutledge and Sutton trade venomous barbs about who is at fault for Iraq and who should pay the political price for what happened. Rutledge seethes, “You know what’s worse than losing your mates in a war zone? It’s knowing that you never should’ve been there in the first place.”
The idea that a foreign policy fiasco would be the cause of antisocial behavior a generation later is also consistent with contemporary social science. Any longitudinal analysis of U.S. public trust in government in this century shows the same trendline: a surge in trust following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, followed by a slow and steady evaporation of that trust as Operation Iraqi Freedom turned out to be based on faulty premises and bad strategy. Other social science research shows that national traumas like pandemics can have durable generational effects on public trust in institutions. Indeed, one could argue that the reservoirs of skepticism within both U.S. political parties toward a more internationalist foreign policy have their origins in the Iraq debacle.
While these tropes about Iraq and distrust are shot through “G20,” so are a lot of other absolutely ridiculous plot points that make the film, at best, an amusing diversion. Perhaps the film’s most noteworthy aspect is the cognitive dissonance between Viola Davis’ steely portrayal of the leader of the free world and the current president’s profound disinterest in promoting democracy or ending global poverty. It is doubtful that Davis’ presidential performance will have the cultural half-life of Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact” or Martin Sheen in “The West Wing.” The warnings in “G20” about the lack of trust and durable cynicism generated by the Iraq War, however, are likely to have more staying power.
Daniel W. Drezner is distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is the author of Drezner’s World.
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