Fahrenheit 9/11

Plot synopsis:
Michael Moore begins the movie begins by suggesting that friends and political allies of George W. Bush at Fox News Channel tilted the presidential election of 2000 by prematurely declaring George W. Bush the winner. It then suggests the handling of the voting controversy in Florida constituted election fraud.The film then segues into the September 11, 2001 attacks, with the screen going black and the film relying solely on sounds to illustrate the chaos on that day. When the film resumes, it continues with scenes of the bystanders, survivors, and falling debris of the World Trade Center. Moore notes that President Bush was informed of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on his way to an elementary school. Bush is then shown sitting in a Florida classroom with kids. When told that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center and that the nation is "under attack" Bush seems wary but calmly continues reading 'The Pet Goat' to the kids, and Moore notes that he continued reading for nearly seven minutes before leaving the school.The film then discusses the causes and aftermath of the September 11 attacks, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Moore then discusses the complex relationships between the U.S. government, the Bush family, the bin Laden family, the Saudi Arabian government, and the Taliban, which span over three decades. Moore alleges that the United States Government evacuated 24 members of the bin Laden family on a secret flight shortly after the attacks, without subjecting them to any form of investigation by the FBI or other security agencies. At the time, all other domestic and international civilian air traffic within the United States was grounded.Moore moves on to examine George W. Bush's Air National Guard service record. Moore contends that Bush's dry-hole oil well attempts were partially funded by the Saudis and by the bin Laden family through the intermediary of James R. Bath. Moore alleges that these conflicts of interest suggest that the Bush administration is not working for the best interests of Americans. The movie continues by suggesting ulterior motives for the War in Afghanistan, including a natural gas pipeline that could be laid through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.Moore alleges that the Bush administration induced a climate of fear among the American population through the mass media after the 9/11 attacks to gain widespread support for his administration and the war in Afghanistan. Moore then describes purported anti-terror efforts, including government infiltration of pacifist groups and other events, and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which vastly expands government powers. After finding out that members of Congress do not read most of the bills that they vote on, including the USA PATRIOT Act, Moore drives through Washington D.C. in an ice cream truck using the external speaker to read the PATRIOT Act to them.The documentary then turns to the subject of the Iraq War, comparing the lives of the Iraqis before and after the invasion. The citizens of Iraq are shown to be living relatively happy lives prior to the country's invasion by the U.S. military in 2003. The film also takes pains to demonstrate war cheerleading in the U.S. media and general bias of journalists, with quotes from news organizations and embedded journalists. The film then shows Bush's moment of "Mission Accomplished" on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. The film alternates between media reports of increased casualties in Iraq and Bush's comment to "Bring 'em on", referring to the Iraqi insurgency.The film then shifts its focus to Moore's hometown, Flint, Michigan. The economically hard-hit town's low-income neighborhoods were the prime target of military recruiters. A recruiter named Sgt. Raymond Plouhar is introduced (he was later killed in Iraq), as he and another marine recruiter talk to potential recruits in the parking lot of a mall. The film introduces Lila Lipscomb, a woman presented as the proud mother of a U.S. serviceman. She expresses her strong sense of patriotism and support for the men and women in uniform.Moore suggests that, because the war was based on a lie, atrocities will occur, and shows footage depicting U.S. abuse of prisoners.Later in the film, Lipscomb reappears with her family after hearing of the death of her son, Sgt. Michael Pederson, who was killed on April 2, 2003, in the Iraqi city of Karbala. Anguished and tearful, she begins to question the purpose of the war and reads a letter from her son that show his own despondency and disenchantment with the war. Because Moore was tired of seeing people like Lila Lipscomb suffer, and after discovering that only one member of Congress has a child serving in Iraq, he distributes armed services enrollment information to various members of Congress and suggests that they enlist their children.Tying together several themes and points, Moore compliments those serving in the U.S. military. He claims that the lower class of America are always the first to join the army and defend the nation, so that the people better off do not have to. He states that those valuable troops should not be sent to risk their lives unless it is absolutely necessary. The film ends with a clip of George W. Bush stumbling through his infamous "Fool me once" quote. The credits roll while Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" plays.Moore dedicated the film to his friend who was killed in the World Trade Center attacks and to those servicemen and women from Flint, Michigan that have been killed in Iraq. The film is also dedicated to "countless thousands" of civilian victims of war as a result of United States military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tags: dark, comedy, realism, anti war, cult, violence, satire, brainwashing, historical, entertaining

Review:
So I was hardly watching this film with an objective eye.That being said (and if you can still trust my review), Michael Moore has done American voters a big service by making this film.
But for once, Moore has made a film that is woven together with a chronological and thematic logic that ultimately asks one critical question: Is it that the Powers that Be don't understand, or that they simply don't believe in, true democratic principles?
In fact, the first 10 minutes are devoted to a skewering of the Democratically-controlled Senate (including, ironically, former V.P., Senate President, and Presidential contender Al Gore.) Moore's commentary here, as with his past films, revolves around the relationship between money and power, and how that connection degrades democracy and in its most insidious form, leads to the loss of innocent lives.
The facts are so tight that the worst anyone can say about the veracity of the film is that it is biased, a critique that will carry far less weight when compared to the snippets of Fox news propaganda spliced into the movie.Moore will be called anti-American, unpatriotic, and probably a fascist.
For a film like this, any publicity is beneficial, and Michael Moore has gone out of his way to thank his conservative detractors for their support.
And it follows the heart of a patriotic woman from Moore's hometown of Flint whose soldier son makes the ultimate sacrifice for Bush's folly.This is, above all, a sympathetic, patriotic and humanistic movie.
Moore's film strips away the pseudo patriotic facade of the Bush administration with humor and tragedy to create a very compelling but flawed message: Bush used false pretenses to go to war while enriching his friends and letting the common people suffer the fallout.
If Moore's agenda had simply been to "dethrone Bush at all costs", then he could have left out a good fifty percent of the film and focused primarily on the man everyone is convinced he loves to hate.
Now who's inferring too much from too little?What is absolutely undeniable is that a) war is horrible, b) the United States of America went to war with Iraq for spurious reasons, c) we have been conspicuously unsuccessful in capturing Osama bin Laden, in part because bin Laden has no relationship whatsoever with Iraq, d) there have been many people who have benefited financially from the war, and those people have a long and in many cases sordid relationship with the Bush family, and e) Bush has used the 9/11 attacks as a way to advance an agenda that is completely unrelated to the attacks themselves, and to infringe on our civil rights.
Any attempt to dissect Michael Moore's arguments fall flat when these basic facts are irrefutable.Fahrenheit 9/11 is ultimately a highly entertaining and justifiably scathing review of the Presidency of George W.
All he does is briefly mention that "Bin Laden was a Saudi" to back up his claim that our real enemy is Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.Moore does deserve credit for calling attention to the now-famous clip showing the President remaining in a kindergarten classroom for seven minutes after having been informed that the country was under attack.
From the way Moore's editing suite puts it, Gore won the election by a mile, the use of clips every time gore wins a state making it look like a cakewalk, until Rupert Murdoch makes sure that he overturns the will of the American people.
Having watched some US news coverage of the war, I would guess that maybe 20% of the viewers knew this, which means that most of the audience of this film would have completely believed this point.Most of Fahrenheit 911 is desperately trying to prove a point.
But I wouldn't consider myself a strong supporter of either, and a film of half accusations and obviously heavily edited film material, is not going to convince anybody of your case either.The film ends with a quote from George Orwell, on how the state manipulates the media and pursues a war with its own people as well as those overseas.
No difference between the tactics of Al queda and the US government?I liked Roger and Me, and Bowling for Columbine, but I'm sorry Mike, having read your frankly appalling, amateurish books, and seen this film, I'm afraid, like the song you desperately wanted to put over the credits at the end, I won't get fooled again..
Moore may be justified in his obvious dislike of Bush, but in the film he supports this using a number of mistruths or careful misrepresentations.These are serious flaws in a documentary.
I recommend watching this film and then watching FahrenHYPE 9/11, a pro-Bush counter to Fahrenheit which calls Moore on some of his careful deception..
If they think that Moore made a good point, they are mistaken as well as nobody can make a strong statement fabricating the facts.I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican but I feel that the party playing all those dirty propaganda tricks deserves not to be elected..
I am also a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Desert Storm, and thus am acutely aware of the realities of war and its intended use only as a last resort when all alternate options are exhausted.I've seen all three of Michael Moore's films; "Roger & Me", "Bowling for Columbine", and now 'Fahrenheit.' Of the three, this current film has a far more disciplined approach.
Moore's audience here is not his long-time left-wing choir; it is the millions of Americans who trusted a President to be one thing and who has turned out to be quite another indeed.The major newspaper reviewers justifiably point to the first 20 minutes and the last 20 minutes, about Bush's Saudi links and the carnage in Iraq, as the strongest segments.
The deaths of our servicemembers are the price we pay for this president's leadership, and Moore demands that the viewer analyze this war with a eye to its true costs and motives.I am sad that there are so many in this country who will refuse to see this film for head- in-the-sand political reasons.
Instead of showing the history behind 9/11 Moore aims the film at one person, W Bush.
If the people who like his movies would actually open their eyes and do just a little bit of investigation, they'd see just how much bias (lies) he actually put in his "documentaries" instead of excepting blindly his truth.
This will of course wow the uninformed public over to Moore's point of view, as for stupid people this propaganda technique is very effective.I would like to inform people of recorded parts in this film according to TIME magazine, which lists parts in this movie that are blatantly misleading and corrects them:(I will only summarize them)Saudis were questioned before leaving after 9/11 and only one plane TOTAL was permitted to leave before airspace was cleared.
When Michael Moore's controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" was released in the summer of 2004, it hit a readiness reaction with a large segment of the American public, people who found themselves increasingly dissatisfied with the direction the country was taking under the Bush administration and who believed that, in this film, someone for the first time was finally giving voice, in a mass media outlet, to their deepest held fears and concerns.
Let's face it; no fiction writer could have concocted a more bizarre and surrealistic series of events than what actually occurred in the United States in the first few years of this millennium: a contested Presidential election followed by a terrorist attack of unprecedented proportions followed by a "retaliatory" war aimed at the wrong country and based almost entirely on faulty intelligence.
The 2004 Presidential election would be a fight to the death, one whose motto was clearly: may the better ideology win.Well, it has been a year since Moore's film hit the streets and almost as long a time since Bush won reelection for a second term as president.
With memories of that horror still lingering in our heads, Moore then proceeds to expose the Bush family's long standing connections with the Saudi royal family, a fact that few people seemed aware of before this film was released.
Moore then goes on to criticize the way in which the Bush administration has exploited the "War on Terror" for maximum political effectiveness, culminating in the Patriot Act which, he argues, has had a draconian impact on the civil rights of ordinary American citizens.But the greatest part of Moore's wrath is saved for the second half of the film, when he confronts what he sees as the wholly unjustifiable war in Iraq.
Watching these gruesome images, we are immediately struck by just how antiseptic the media's coverage of the war has been here in the United States - a fact that Moore blames not only on the Bush administration but on a press that has allowed itself to become little more than an extension of the rah-rah, war-rallying propaganda machine set up by the government (a government, for instance, that refused to allow any pictures to be taken of flag-draped coffins coming back from the war zone).The section dealing with the Iraq War is the most emotionally devastating section of the film, mainly because Moore is able to bring it home to us personally through the ordinary individuals who have been most directly affected by it - soldiers on the field, amputees in the hospital and, most heartbreakingly, the mother of a boy killed in a helicopter crash in April, 2003.
It is fine that he does not like President Bush and Moore has every right to put what he wants into "his movie" but the number of people who actually believe it is all fact is down right frightening.
The fact that there are thousands of people proclaiming this tripe as gospel is far more dammning an indictment of America than is Michael Moore's poorly reasoned and sloppy "documentary." unless the sort of propagandistic garbage contained in this film is roundly discredited and revealed for what it is( an incoherent assault on America, not just bush) than our country is in far worse straights than even Moore would admit.as an interesting aside, i find it hilarious that Mr. Moore is severely obese, VERY WEALTHY( he lives in a 1.9 million dollar apartment in new york city) and is STUPID( he flunked out of college), when he entitled a book stupid white men, and yells at Americans for being....wait for it...
Instead he takes things said out of context, ignores the messages the Bush administration was putting out there and most importantly he does not address the difficult situation President Bush was in at the time, which a "documentary" should do.Consider we had just had 9-11 and the American people wanted action.
I could take all the available film footage of Mother Theresa and do a "Moore" like movie showing that she was a terrible person that hurt everybody in sight.
Despite the mind-numbing subjectivity, the first half of this pseudo-documentary is interesting, and if Michael Moore had just stuck to his conspiracy theory with the September 11 terrorist attacks, he would have made reasonably good film.
Since Micheal Moore movie has allegations against the current US president and his administration I see it as truly damaging to the country's unity and encouraging to any who hate the US.
My nation needs true patriots who uphold positive moral truths and this man, Michael Moore, seems to be far off in this regard, as he paints the president and his administration as the bad guys.
It also smacks horribly of Moore's famous editing of the facts for effect.Many times in this film, people mention that the terror threat just does not exist.
I believe he could have strengthened his film by showing Iraq for what it was, and not creating a fictional account of life there.The greatest point Moore makes is in the interview with a retired FBI agent, who questions the removal of 250 or so Arab citizens from the US post 9/11, by air, when all air traffic in the US had been grounded.
At least Bowling for columbine was entertaining because you always wanted to see how Moore would shame and degrade himself next, but in this film all he does is splice together a series of never ending archive footage of George W Bush, the war on terror, politicians, etc and narrate the unrelated sequences in the most monotone voice imaginable.
The later part of the film focuses more towards the soldiers fighting in Iraq.Michael Moore uses just enough truth to make believers of the ignorant and the extreme wing of the Democratic Party.
If not, he should be given the damage he has done to the credibility of those trying to unseat Bush.The bottom line is Michael Moore does not allow facts to get in the way of his message.
I had the afternoon to kill, so thought I'd watch "Fahrenheit 9/11"Phrases like, "learn to edit!", "steaming manure pile!", "a real clock watcher!" come to mind.The movie loosely focuses on the ilks of the Bush administration.
Read Richard Clarke's AP interview regarding the film.Read these comments on the movie from 2 liberal reporters: On Wednesday Newsweek's Michael Isikoff detailed an array of errors in the movie that included, not just mistaken analysis, but seriously false claims - like the charge that the Bush White House let members of the bin Laden family flee the U.S. without any of them being interviewed by the FBI.Then there's the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, who calls Moore's movie "juvenile in its approach" and "awful in its journalism," adding that some of his claims are so easily dismissible that "Fahrenheit" serves as "a warning to the Democrats to keep the loony left at a safe distance."Enjoy this mockumentary -I thought it was a waste..
The people who love this movie must ignore reality to such a degree where they will believe anything as long as it is bad against Bush.In a time of war and when our troops are fighting for their lives and for freedom to keep us safe, the fact that this movie makes their sacrifices seem trivial and portrays us (yes I am a soldier and have been to the Gulf three times so don't tell me I don't know what I am talking about) as enjoying shooting up Iraqis and us torturing them for enjoyment is a disgrace.
So before this Mike chump goes and attempts to make a movie making try to hate Bush and feel sorry for his home town of Flint, Michigan, he needs to get his facts straight and have an open mind instead of being so biased.
This time its President Bush, which is not hard.About half way threw the film you begin to wonder what Moores point is as he side tracks of subject.
Okay so some of it makes sense but then Moore will then show Iraq as a nice happy place, before America and Britian invaded.When I saw the film in Manchester people walked out, now I have to wonder whether this was out of disagreement or boredom.A great opening and ending and some good and funny moments along the way, but all in all too boring and with no point what so ever..
It was made by a group that didn't set out to make a film to counter Moore's movie, but as they investigated they discovered that Moore likes to re-order time and to twist facts in a way the changes the truth (to put it nicely).One example of what Moore did was take a minor "Letter to Editor" entry from a newspaper and change it into a newspaper headline.
I'm sure, if he had taken the time he could have found more family members of veterans who actually agreed with his point of view, but he instead chose to hack and splice his opinions and express them through those who do not, thereby victimizing them further.Luckily, I saw a news program with just a few of these people and after hearing what they had to say I didn't purchase a ticket, or rent this movie.
This movie will show you exactly Michael Moore's opinion on the political topics today with no room for interpretation, or even statistical facts to prove them.
If you want to see a good Michael Moore documentary, watch Roger & Me, otherwise you are just wasting your money to say that you more liberal than your friends..
The film, while featuring several scenes that are extremely moving, feels hastily put together (a problem also suffered by 'Bowling for Columbine') and occasionally tone-deaf (e.g., the long, long sequence where Moore traces the connections between the Bush family and the Saudis--based in fact, but not inspiring the kind of shocked indignation he clearly expects it to).
The connection that Moore tried to make with Bush and the Bin Ladens is where I stopped believing this movie could present evidence.
I am not a big fan of Bush, but Moore's claims just took me right out of the film.
Not a documentary- Moore like an erroneous movie..
yes big mistakes were made by the Bush administration, but my griff isn't with the political views Moore takes in this movie, its with the the way he presents them, if your going to make a documentary, then make a DOCUMENTARY, not a journey into the mind of yourself, he promotes people to make up their own mind, and yet he plasters images of deceit and half truths in front of them on the big screen all depicting his radical left wing views in a extremely slanted way, and then expects the same mindless cant think for themselves Americans to come out of the theater with there own opinions, not likely.
Not saying that all Americans are mindless, but when presented propaganda like Moores new slanted so called documentary, chances are a good lot of the people who watched it are going come out with Moores political views and not their own.