I just finished watching the Battle in Seattle feature film. I wanted to like it more than I did. I was aware of David Solnit's (one of the Direct Action Network's organizers) concerns about it (see www.yesmagazine.org/issues/purple-America/the-battle-for-reality for a summary, an interview with the director and Solnit at www.democracynow.org/2008/9/18/battle_in_seattle_with_a_list, and a participatory historical website at http://realbattleinseattle.org/), before I started watching.
The film had a great, dramatic, even potentially epic, subject, and a noble idea to tell the story from multiple points of view. I applaud its ambition and I'm glad I saw it. The mini-film essay by Stuart Townsend, labeled "The Making of the Battle of Seattle" (included on the DVD) is actually quite great describing the film Townsend wanted to make. He wanted to make a film fictionalizing and personalizing, through the eyes of multiple characters, the struggles that converged in Seattle during the WTO conference. It's an ambitious goal, and Townsend deserves praise for attempting it.
Unfortunately, however, Townsend didn't succeed in making that movie. There are so many characters that they got lost in the cross-cutting, and remained schematic and two- dimensional. The film doesn't portray the activists either as full-blooded people nor does it at all accurately portray the organizational structures used. It refers to affinity groups a couple of times, but fails to actually show any actually discussing anything.
The scenes outside the jail at the solidarity rallies for those inside come alive, but inside the jail, instead of a hubbub of discussions, debates, singing, and workshops, Townsend repeatedly portrays a group of silent, sullen, defeated arrestees. The exception is Django, an upbeat African-American pro-turtle activist, who gets one of the best moments in the film when, trying to cheer everyone else up, he says that now everyone will know what the WTO is, but then instantly amends that claim to say, "Well, they probably won't know what it is. But they'll know it's something bad."
The attempts at portraying a budding romance between two apparently heterosexual activists is not written well enough to be at all believable. And, to mention just one of potentially many political concerns, there were no gays or lesbians in Seattle protesting?
And we're supposed to believe that a cop whose pregnant lover has just been attacked by a police officer, mistaking her for a protester, and causing her to miscarry, is going to take out his anger by chasing a lone demonstrator (a key organizer, of course), and personally beat him bloody? And then the same police officer is going to enter the jail and apologize for doing it?
There's two ciphers of character who could potentially have been quite fascinating, a Doctors Without Borders activist (who gets one good moment when he asks the trade representatives how they'd feel if their children were the ones who were going to die because they couldn't afford medicines because of the policies they were making) who is trying to pressure the WTO from within, and a trade minister from an un-named African country. But we never see them as anything but cardboard stand-ins for a position, never see them struggling with a decision, and never hear them articulate any kind of point of view about the protests and the impact they are having.
The direction at times was quite good, but I'm not sure it was such a good idea to mix in the real footage because the real footage is so much more dramatic and powerful than the fictional, watching it just made me wish I were watching a documentary instead of a docudrama. Townsend, in his "Making Of" segment, voices the hope that the film will motivate folks to want to learn more. The movie has motivated me to want to watch "This is What Democracy Looks Like" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265871/) and "30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315734/), so at least to that extent, the Battle in Seattle succeeded.
The film had a great, dramatic, even potentially epic, subject, and a noble idea to tell the story from multiple points of view. I applaud its ambition and I'm glad I saw it. The mini-film essay by Stuart Townsend, labeled "The Making of the Battle of Seattle" (included on the DVD) is actually quite great describing the film Townsend wanted to make. He wanted to make a film fictionalizing and personalizing, through the eyes of multiple characters, the struggles that converged in Seattle during the WTO conference. It's an ambitious goal, and Townsend deserves praise for attempting it.
Unfortunately, however, Townsend didn't succeed in making that movie. There are so many characters that they got lost in the cross-cutting, and remained schematic and two- dimensional. The film doesn't portray the activists either as full-blooded people nor does it at all accurately portray the organizational structures used. It refers to affinity groups a couple of times, but fails to actually show any actually discussing anything.
The scenes outside the jail at the solidarity rallies for those inside come alive, but inside the jail, instead of a hubbub of discussions, debates, singing, and workshops, Townsend repeatedly portrays a group of silent, sullen, defeated arrestees. The exception is Django, an upbeat African-American pro-turtle activist, who gets one of the best moments in the film when, trying to cheer everyone else up, he says that now everyone will know what the WTO is, but then instantly amends that claim to say, "Well, they probably won't know what it is. But they'll know it's something bad."
The attempts at portraying a budding romance between two apparently heterosexual activists is not written well enough to be at all believable. And, to mention just one of potentially many political concerns, there were no gays or lesbians in Seattle protesting?
And we're supposed to believe that a cop whose pregnant lover has just been attacked by a police officer, mistaking her for a protester, and causing her to miscarry, is going to take out his anger by chasing a lone demonstrator (a key organizer, of course), and personally beat him bloody? And then the same police officer is going to enter the jail and apologize for doing it?
There's two ciphers of character who could potentially have been quite fascinating, a Doctors Without Borders activist (who gets one good moment when he asks the trade representatives how they'd feel if their children were the ones who were going to die because they couldn't afford medicines because of the policies they were making) who is trying to pressure the WTO from within, and a trade minister from an un-named African country. But we never see them as anything but cardboard stand-ins for a position, never see them struggling with a decision, and never hear them articulate any kind of point of view about the protests and the impact they are having.
The direction at times was quite good, but I'm not sure it was such a good idea to mix in the real footage because the real footage is so much more dramatic and powerful than the fictional, watching it just made me wish I were watching a documentary instead of a docudrama. Townsend, in his "Making Of" segment, voices the hope that the film will motivate folks to want to learn more. The movie has motivated me to want to watch "This is What Democracy Looks Like" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265871/) and "30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315734/), so at least to that extent, the Battle in Seattle succeeded.