Embarrassing , Manipulative garbage!

Rating: 1/10 (8 April 2007)

I was conflicted for about two seconds before deciding to give a film like this a bad review, a film that I really am a minority in since it was widely praised and reached by some miraculous flight to number 62 in the IMDb top 250. It's just a shameless and grueling piece of film-making, and I can't help but feel disgusted that the Rwandan genocide has been reduced and distilled by Hollywood into this.
The injustice is overbearing. As someone who was in lower Manhattan on 9/11, I resented Oliver Stone for making his swan song 'World Trade Center', another hand wringing piece of garbage that was so disconnected from the reality of the event it was laughable, which is terrible because the last thing you want is to see such an inaccurate reflection of events to where you are forced by the director to sneer and feel uncomfortable at a film about it. Believe me, people, there were no violins playing in Rwanda while this was going on. I appreciate how people are waking up to genocide and injustice in Africa and how Don Cheadle has taken his research from this film and gone on to bring tremendous public awareness to places like Sudan, but that is all I can give this.
For one, it does nothing to speak of the actual problems that led to the genocide in the first place, leaving an audience that might not know about the lead up to this story (and I do think the target audience for this film has no idea where Rwanda is on a map) to come to the conclusion that there is such thing as 'faceless evil', as arbitrary as some of the worst crimes humanity has ever encountered are, things aren't this simple, black-white, right-wrong. I think this kind of mentality has led the way for Bush's statements on 'good and evil' and 'evildoers' to be taken at face value, without questioning the social, political, religious, or moral conflicts that might have led to an act of genocide like this, or an act like September 11. I suggest instead of watching this film and thinking you have learned something about history, you pick up a book like 'The Graves are Not Yet Full' to understand the complex dynamics in Africa, dynamics that have led to generations being wiped out by ethnic cleansing and tribal conflict. I worry that a film like this closes out on a still ongoing argument, leaving the viewer with a feeling that even in the face of humanity's most vile action, 'everything will be okay' with people like Paul Rusesabagina around. This simply is not true.
This film made me viscerally angry. This wasn't simply a 'bad movie', I feel like it stepped over a personal boundary, my own human boundary and insulted me, and literally millions of other people that have to endure life's struggle as it's given to them. I watch this and I feel ashamed to only have to endure the hour and a half of this film, and that is the stark low point of my day. I feel ashamed to even afford a ticket to waste on this movie. It's watered down, inaccurate film-making at it's most manipulative point, and that is what makes me angry, not to mention Don Cheadle's embarrassing attempt to 'be African' while driving in carefully placed advertisements for Volkswagon. Really he is a just sheltered like the rest of us, a Hollywood movie star sucking in fat paychecks while there is real, not dramatized, suffering in the world just adds to the pain of watching the film. I saw 'Sometimes in April' recently and found this to be much more believable and affecting a film, I would recommend this well above 'Hotel Rwanda'. The realities are still out there, this is fantasy. I know this is harsh, but this film insults my intelligence as a film-goer and as a human being.