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Peace for our time, 20 July 2006
Author: SnorriGodhi from the Sagas of Icelanders

A full review of this movie should discuss whether it is true to the facts, but many others have done so, on and off IMDb, much better than I can. In any case, one should never go to a political documentary hoping to learn The Truth. I am particularly skeptical about Michael Moore because I remember him stating, in "Roger and Me", that General Motors was making "huge profits" in the 1980s. (That does not mean that everything Moore says is wrong).

Leaving facts aside, I shall focus on two other issues. The first is that it is wrong to say that this movie is anti-gun: it is anti-anything that Moore doesn't like. That includes, but is not limited to, big corporations, the media, and American intervention abroad. Moore even tries to blame violence on the media's obsession with violence; which, taken to its logical conclusion, implies that he should blame violence on his own documentary.

Arguably, the broad range of targets makes it a better movie: if Moore had only one target, he would have presented only one side of the argument. The drawback is that the viewer can get any message he or she wants to get. At least, this is the impression that I get from the IMDb reviews.

The other issue that I want to discuss is related to the opening sentence of the movie: "It was the morning of April 20th 1999 (...) The President bombed another country whose name we couldn't pronounce." A minimally-educated European will be reminded of Neville Chamberlain saying: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."

As I said, American intervention is, in fact, one of the targets of this movie; but Moore does not discuss in detail any specific war, possibly because he could not pronounce the name of any of the countries. The reason Moore is opposed to these wars is that he thinks they have created a culture of violence within the USA. The evidence that he offers for this claim is that Marilyn Manson also thinks so.

So Michael Moore reveals himself: not a new Riefenstahl or a new Goebbels, as some people claim, but a new Chamberlain. Michael Moore wants peace for our time. We foreigners can kill each other without restraint: Michael Moore won't make documentaries about it, unless we live in countries with names easy to pronounce.

Actually, the comparison to Chamberlain is not entirely appropriate: Neville Chamberlain was an elected leader, and his policy of appeasement had the full backing of the British people, who are collectively to blame for the failure of appeasement. Moore, needless to say, does not have the full backing of American people.

Incidentally, Moore does not mention Chamberlain in the movie, but he does mention Gandhi, during the Charlton Heston interview. However, it would seem that Moore has no clear idea of what Gandhi actually accomplished.

While my comments range from the sarcastic to the scathing, I did find the movie quite entertaining, and it introduced me to some interesting characters, James Nichols for example. People who have read this review up to here will probably look at the movie critically, and therefore I can recommend it to them (except if they don't want to finance Michael Moore, of course). Unfortunately, it is more likely to be seen by people who would stop reading at the first negative comment.

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