A total failure Fahrenheit 9/11....where do I start at? Probably at the need for such a movie. Does the current situation in the government need questioning? Of course it does. With as many fundamental changes in the past four years (Not only 9/11 but the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act) an assessment is needed. Are we winning in the war on terror? Is this the way our country should be going? What really is happening beyond the nightly news? The trouble is an assessment would be just that, and it would also require objectivity, such as seeing President Bush as being something other than Satan, and critiquing the intelligence and diplomatic failures of Clinton, Reagan, and further on back. I have no doubt in fifty or a hundred years the events of this time will be seen in a completely different light than now.
And is F9/11 that needed assessment? Not in any way shape or form. An intelligent and thoughtful movie could have been constructed around the Patriot Act alone, which would also have been boring and required the audience to think.
F9/11 is little more than a Bush/Right Wing basher's dream movie, and Michael Moore goes beyond trying to make any sort of documentary into the realm of bringing every conspiracy theory of the past thirty years to life. In the world he presents, there is NO terrorist threat, everything is an Orwellian conspiracy to make phony wars for money, and Bush/Halliburton/Cheney are somehow behind it all.
Much of the movie has been debunked on web sites and talk shows, yet what really bothered me is many fans of this movie realized it was full of distortions and falsehoods, yet accepted it anyways. Like the debacle with CBS and the National Guard memos, the evidence may be false but the message is true.
Three things really stood out in my mind and bothered me about this movie. The first was arguably is the movie's main talking point, about how the Bin Laden family was allegedly moved out of the US before the airspace had opened after 9/11. (Again debunked, but play along.) With his usual snideness Moore says that one of the first people to talk to after someone commits a crime is the family. But he ignores two key points:
1. The Bin Laden family is huge, Mohammed Bin Laden had over twenty children, and many of them have not seen Osama Bin Laden since 1981.
2. Nowhere has Michael Moore or any left wing conspiracy theorist come up with proof or evidence that any of the people on those planes did know something, or could provide any sort of intelligence.
Indeed, the better people to talk to would have been Osama's associates since he's been playing revolutionary for two decades in places like Afghanistan and Sudan, not hobnobbing with his family. However, for Moore and his audience, simply raising the allegation is good enough.
The second thing that bothered me is when Moore goes traipsing around to several congressman trying to get them to sign up their children to join the military. Completely forgotten is that to join the military a person must be 18 and therefore an adult, the parents legally CAN'T sign their own children up. Did this somehow escape Moore's vaunted three-tier fact-checking system? The last thing is the now infamous scenes of a Iraq before the war started. Moore can say whatever he wants, but the impression put on people in the theater, and on me, was that he was saying Iraq was a peaceful and happy place we just started bombing. We get a vague showing of Rumsfeld next to Saddam and the implication of more military industrial conspiracies as we supported Saddam in the eighties, but that's about it. Not mentioned is our relation to Iran at that time and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. Or the First Gulf War. Or the Kurdish rebellion. Or of Saddam's role as a torturer at the Palace of the End. There was plenty of blame to go around for everyone.
I fully believe Moore knew much of his movie was bogus, and instead intended it to play into what the audience wanted to hear. Certainly a lot of gullible people were buying it up when it came out. The Democrats and the thinking Left didn't outrightly endorse the movie, but instead were more than glad to let it ride as long as it was helping them out.
And therein lies the ultimate failure of Moore's "opinion piece" documentary. Judging from some of the remarks he was posting on his website last summer, he seemed surprised that the movie ran it's course and left the theaters. I really think he was expecting F9/11 to spark a revolution. But the only people who bought the message were already converted. A movie such as this, so blatantly out to destroy Bush, if anything had a backlash. Many people, including me, were motivated to go out and vote against Kerry. This cost the Democrats a lot of power, and I think Moore lost a good portion of his clout.
Indeed, I believe this movie will be the high water mark of his career. Too many people now know his style and approach, and aren't willing to be featured in his movies. And I don't think anybody at this point is still believing his "common man with a camera" image. In ten years, I really think nobody will even know who Michael Moore is. Or was.