A dinosaur movie

Rating: 7/10 (5 June 2006)

This film is an important lesson in history, brought to us by George Clooney, who directed the movie and co-wrote the script. There was a dark period in the US history, a time when people were bullied and persecuted for alleged communist sympathies. It is known as the McCarthy era, and people are just about to forget all its lessons, because that's what people do, they routinely lose the relevance of any historical event that is more than 50 years old.
But the film is more than this. It is also a window into the past of television, the way it started, with journalistic integrity, lack of censorship from the "corporate branches" and reporters that knew and used words most US citizens think are French. The movie starts and ends with a speech that warns about the misuse and/or abandonment of the media.
The movie is shot in black and white, I have no particular sympathy for this method of depicting past events, I think that the world was not black and white back then as it is not 2D today. The cast is full of good actors and George Clooney plays a rather secondary role, leaving the lead to David Strathairn, who does a great role.
Now, if you put aside the important messages in the film you don't leave much. The acting is good, the script is informative, but the atmosphere is difficult to grasp, intellectual. People who knew about the McCarthy period and how journalism should be done are the ones who will love this movie, while the people who need to know what this movie explains will probably switch the channel or fall asleep during watching.
In the end, it is hard for anyone to be on the side of McCarthy now, yet the parallels to todays US political reign are obvious enough. One can see another message, rather a prediction, that Bush, like McCarthy, will eat himself up, will disappear as a dark footnote in the history books, only to be remembered as the guy who played fear and sang freedom.
That's why I named my comment a dinosaur movie. It's about people that you will not find in television now, it's about people that became extinct, yet towered over anything making a news report today. It is also about dinosaur politics, fast acting, smashing and disturbing in result, doomed to extinction from starvation.