- Director
- Matthew Heineman
- Rating
- R (United States)
- Running Time
- 94 minutes
- Release Date
- November 19th, 2021
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s AFI Fest, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
Though things are starting to look up, much of the world finds itself in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As with any big worldwide event, films about it are inevitable. To that point, there have already been a few documentaries about the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on the start of the pandemic but none have yet to approach it from the North American perspective. The First Wave does exactly that. As the title suggests, the film tackles the first wave of the pandemic in one of the first hardest hit areas which was New York City. Following the lives of the nurses, doctors, and administrators at a group of area hospitals during the first days of the pandemic, things became rather bleak. However, despite a fair share of powerful moments captured by some truly intimate footage, the film does lose some of that intensity as it trails off near the end.
That being said, the sheer emotion on display is undeniable as one can’t help but feel for those on the front lines fighting a relatively unknown illness at the time while caring for their patients for which they’ve developed strong connections to. The frustration of fighting what seemed like an insurmountable battle took an emotional toll on all involved as it was surely worse for the families of those in the hospital hit with COVID. The film also did a great job capturing the other side of the equation as family members of COVID patients could do nothing but wait as their loved ones are being treated, only being able to communicate by video. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t easy and the doctors and hospital staff also connected to that frustration. In spite of the bleakness, The First Wave remains hopeful but the battle continues though the battle went far beyond COVID as the film arguably trailed off to tackle other issues such as racial injustice.
In the end, The First Wave may still be hard to watch for some but it is still an important one. Just keep fighting.
still courtesy of National Geographic Documentary Films
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.