Farenheit 9/11 2004
After hearing about this movie over and over I finally got around to seeing it. It is a typical Moore movie in that it throws up all kinds of stuff without much rhyme or reason and makes few if any conclusions. He appears a lot less in this movie than in his past ones and there are fewer stunts (though he has a great one where he asks congressmen to send their kids to fight in Iraq). It certainly wasn’t as funny as past ones and I think he gets deliberately manipulative by showing dead Iraqi children. This is the same level of journalism that dictates school bus crashes should lead on the news.
Some points are made better than others. The whole thing at the beginning about the connections with the bin Laden family fell flat. The bin Ladens are a rich family, like Saudi Rockefellers. Moore made them sound like they must all be terrorists because their name is bin Laden and that getting them out of the country on 9/13 was a huge mistake. In fact he acts like all Saudis are supporting terrorism without providing anything to support it, like you’ll just accept it.
The problem is there is material out there for 20 exhaustive movies and Moore has taken little pieces and condensed them down into a Pupu Platter of 9/11, Iraq, Homeland Security, and the Bush administration.
With so much to cover he takes a lot of shortcuts. It is true that many Bush administration officials made a point of mentioning Saddam and terrorism at almost the same time even though the link was negligible. Moore takes sound bites of “Saddam” and “Al Qaeda” and mashes them together. He’s making a point, but he doesn’t really say what the point is or support it. You could take all kinds of things those people have said on tape and re-edit them to say anything you want.
The movie is obviously one-sided. Some people have said it doesn’t matter because it is making a point. But I don’t think it is effective to make a point in such a one-sided fashion. My girlfriend afterwards said “Well, even if only half of what they said is true, it’s still pretty bad for Bush.” But that’s just the problem. It would be more damaging if 100% of what was presented was irrefutable. That’s not what Moore does, but a disconnected 2-hour rant that brushes the surface doesn’t offer much (but maybe it will open some people’s eyes).
In his other movies like Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine he took issues that people knew a little about like plant closings and gun violence, and showed you what it was like on personal local level. Here he mostly stays at a higher level (he does have a lot about a mother in Flint, Michigan whose son is killed) on stuff that most people should know or are probably familiar with already. So I was a little disappointed that he didn’t have more to add.
It’s worth watching and I think in a lot of ways this will become an important overview of the W presidency that will open the door to further study, but I thought the movie was kind of weak. I’ll give it a B-.