(spoilers for the entire movie)

In another universe, Sicario is a movie that begins with Benicio Del Toro's character's wife and daughter being murdered by a rival cartel, proceeds with him striking a deal with the CIA and Josh Brolin's character, capturing Guillermo, and ultimately hunting down the two jefes in a bittersweet ending. Emily Blunt's character would have been a minor antagonist presented as a naive government agent that gets in the way of real justice carried out by our beloved anti-hero Alejandro.

It would have been a standard Hollywood revenge story, but by swapping the main character to Kate it tells a much deeper story. Sicario is ultimately a meditation on power: the overwhelming power of systems and what it's like to come to terms with your powerlessness as an individual in the face of these systems. The reframing of the story to be from Kate's perspective rather than Alejandro's perspective brings to the forefront the contradiction between the average Hollywood film's message of "a single badass hero can change the course of history" and the reality we all deal with every day, of "every choice you make exists in the shadow of unimaginably powerful systems, there is no escape from this fact."

The movie makes me reflect on how our lives are controlled by invisible yet giant mega-structures beyond our comprehension and how we barely understand our own emotions and our own bodies, yet in the middle lies us: a helpless consciousness that needs to make decisions anyway in the face of this infinite complexity and extremely limited knowledge.

Your own life is a game of chess. It's basically impossible for you to know if any move you make gets you closer to winning or losing, yet move you must.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Kate is brave, competent, and genuinely wants to make a difference yet she's ultimately a pawn in a massive game being played at the nation-state level. She's also completely expendable. If she had died at the border crossing when her assassin hit his shot, she could simply be swapped out for her partner. The meeting at the office where Josh Brolin's character is evaluating her and Daniel Kaluuya's character shows this: the CIA is free to pick the most convenient pawn for the situation. It means nothing to them but means everything to our heroes.

• Everyone passes the buck. Alejandro tells Kate he merely does what the CIA tells him to. Josh Brolin, a stand-in for the CIA, says he's only doing what he's directed to do by elected officials. Elected officials would say their direction is based off what the public wants. What the public wants is dictated by the media, and the media would say they're just giving the public what they want. Within this calcified system, the individuals that appear to have the most agency are the ones that accept their lack of choice. Alejandro knows he's a pawn for the CIA's ambition to prop up a cartel they control, but he makes the most of being a pawn.

• I really liked the detail of the inside jokes and casual banter between Josh Brolin (Matt) and the military guys. If Matt or Alejandro were the main characters, these jokes might just be funny but since we follow along with Kate we get the sense that we're walking in on a story that's been going on for years and we feel like a mere side character.

• Silvio, a Mexican cop who works for the cartel, is the perfect distillation of a pawn. His choices start and end within the confines of his own home: go to his kid's soccer game or sleep in, coffee for breakfast or liquor. If he doesn't do what the cartel says he dies. At one point he's literally moved forward as a pawn by Alejandro and sacrificed in Alejandro's chess game to get Diaz (the queen), and ultimately Fausto (the king).

• Silvio is a cautionary tale to the viewer of what happens when you give up completely in the face of systems more powerful than you: he was a letdown as father and husband. He was an alcoholic that didn't even know his son's greatest passion was football and wanted to sleep in instead of helping him attend his game, which reminds us that even when we're helpless to change society we can still make choices that have positive outcomes for our immediate surroundings. Silvio redeems himself by following along with Alejandro's orders, who tells him "Everything you do now you do for your family" and we see Silvio's sacrifice make a difference for them as they are still alive at the end of the film.

• At the end of the film Kate is faced with the "choice" of signing off on the cartel job at gunpoint. She signs it understanding that not signing it would align with her principles but just pass the buck to some other helpless agent, likely Daniel Kaluuya's character. She learns that acting against her principles makes sense in some cases, likely sending her down the same path that Josh Brolin's character went down: once someone who believed in abiding one's principles but worn down by reality over the years.

• Kate is also faced with the choice of killing Alejandro. She chooses not to: both of them understand, after everything that's happened, that the choice makes literally no difference to the massive war being fought. She realizes that, at least some of the time, she can act according to her principles, and she chooses her principles. In the chess game of life the pieces aren't just pieces: they're the people and values we hold dear. And sometimes it makes sense to sacrifice them, but how can we ever know it's the right thing to do? This is the absurd joke of life.