simplistic, dishonest, manipulative blather

Rating: 3/10 (5 June 2001)

(Spoilers here, so don't read if you don't want plot details) This movie manipulates the audience by showing one version of events before the trial and another (in very short flashes) during it. I suppose we are meant to think that no one knows the truth about what really happened so we have to accept the officer's conclusion that he had to protect his men by firing on the crowd. The justification of "he did what he had to do and any other real military man would have done the same thing under the same circumstances" has a surface plausibility, but could justify *any* behavior. We need to make distinctions and draw lines, not have a cheap patriotism used to cover over exploring whether someone made a mistake. I have rarely felt this angry after viewing a film. To use, for example, the little girl with one leg as a pathetic victim and then to show her with a weapon (is it what happened or is it what the officer thought he saw?) is the worst sort of manipulation. Since I was watching on DVD, I could go back and examine the first version of the crowd scenes, which had absolutely no evidence of weapons. Finally, only the Marines are decent people, much less heroic. The ambassador, the national security guy and even the ambassador's wife are shown to be moral midgets, so our "hero" looks pretty good even if he did order the killing of dozens of civilians. As several reviewers have noted, there was an opportunity to make some difficult moral points and to explore complex issues, but the film settled for simple lies and one-dimensional characters. A waste of actors.