I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film since I heard that Michael Moore was making it. It’s been doing excellent box office in America, but given the sales of his books, that’s maybe not surprising.
The film starts with the well-trodden Bush election fiasco. Actually, it wasn’t a fiasco, it was a travesty of justice. How the world’s largest democracy can screw up the election of its president is quite shocking. Moore’s been through this in his books, but in an election and with peoples’ short memories, it’s always worth reminding ourselves what happened.
We then get into Bush family links with the Saudis and the Bin Ladens. Then there’s all the extended connections with Bush’s friends. It’s all enormously incestuous, and it’s incredible to think that Clinton got such a tough time over things like Whitewater.
Finally we get into Iraq and the reasons, or lack of, for the invasion. And it’s here, when we meet the families of soldiers and soldiers themselves, who’ve been sent out there, that the film is at its most powerful. Although it’s slightly fatuous to go out and ask Senate members why their sons and daughters aren’t serving, it’s always worth pointing out that it’s the poor who really have to do the grunt work. And there’s the incredible profiteering that’s going on right now in Iraq with the contracts that have been won. I’m staggered that Moore was able to film some of the stuff he did at a conference where big businesses came together to discuss how best to profit from the war.
The title really refers to the climate of fear that we’ve all been put under, with ridiculous warning lights to tell us how dangerous things are, and to put us in a mind to hand back some of those civil liberties we’ve gained over the last few centuries. This isn’t just happening in the US but right here in Britiain.
I’m sure that this film is going to find a voice in the UK too, and with the popular John Edwards now standing alongside Kerry as the Democratic ticket, Bush has got to be gone now.