I
saw a screening of this film back in November at the
drone summit in DC. It's wonderful. I was a
bit put-off and staggered, to be frank, at the time, because someone involved
with the film bragged about how inexpensively it had been made, and yet the
budget was so unfathomably huge that I knew that if
an anti-war organization had that kind of
money we could hire organizers all over the world and quite possibly make the
abolition of war a major mainstream force.
And,
of course, you can't simply ask if the money was well spent, because no one will
say that it was spent to end the practice of drone murder. The
director and the cast, of course, say they
wanted to make a socially important film about a serious issue, but not what
they wanted to accomplish, beyond raising questions and being entertaining.
Everyone's always happy to say that a film opposes racism or cruelty to animals
or bullying, but not war.
But,
you hundreds of millions of odd-balls who, like me, happen to give a damn
whether your government is murdering people in your name with your money will,
in fact, want to make this film a huge viral success. I'm telling you, right
now, it's a good one. It is indeed entertaining. It's not simple, predictable,
pedantic, or preaching. But neither is the film itself reluctant to face
head-on the banal, evil, arrogant mass-murder engaged in by these young people
who dress up in pilots suits to sit at desks in trailers taking orders from
military bureaucrats and private contractors, and ultimately from a president
who reviews
a list of potential men, women, and
children to murder on Tuesdays.
[aka: Assassination
Tuesdays]
Drones
look like a golden opportunity to war makers who don't want to ask Congress or
the U.N. or the public, don't want to send in armies, just want to target people
and groups for death anywhere in the world and obliterate them with the push of
a button from an air-conditioned -- or, sometimes not so air-conditioned --
office.
But
drones also look like a golden opportunity to those of us who have been trying
to point out that murder and war are distinguished only by scale. I suspect
that many who cannot see the bombing of a city as murder will see the
drone-targeting of an individual as nothing else -- particularly if they watch
this film.
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