The film is very good not as great as it could be if the director had completed certain key moments and use digital techniques to illuminate things. But overall it is very good and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. His film-making style is like a very good 1980's TV Movie a bit plain but solid and very watchable. No cinematic auteur just a good rock-steady hand of a director. It suffers sometimes from budget limitations but at those points they cut to real-life news footage to make up for what their low budget could not afford to create. So with some limitations and some criticisms of lost opportunities I still say well done and it is worth buying either on DVD or BD. For me a simple addition could have made all the difference. They do have infamous footage of the CEO of STARBUCKS talking while attending a basketball game about the fact that his store(s) in SEATTLE has had its windows smashed and cannot do business that he describes as "an injustice" at this point the director/film should have used clever digital graphics to illuminate the truth about the STARBUCKS model. That at the point in history at which STARBUCKS had convinced the consumers to pay more for a cup of coffee than they had paid at any time in history in both numerical and value real-terms price/cost...the price being paid to the Third World peasant farmers who grow the coffee beans had reached the ALL-TIME lowest price in real-terms in the history of the coffee market. The failure of the director to juxtapose that fact with the CEO's audacious use of the phrase "injustice" boggles my mind. That simple fact would have explained so clearly to the audience what the protesters in the movie were fighting for and about. That in real terms the growers were better paid back in the 70's when a cup of coffee was 50cents (or less) than in the Clintonite 90's when a cup of STARBUCKS could be as much as $6:50. Boiling down the WTO issues to that could have been a great help for those people watching the film who don't know this stuff. So on that score the director missed an opportunity. As I say though over-all the film is very good and well worth getting the DVD.
Review of Battle in Seattle
