FARENHEIT 9/11
http://www.fahrenheit911.com/

Written + Directed by Michael Moore

Reviewed by Ketlan Ossowski

I've just managed to see Fahrenheit 9/11, the Michael Moore film that was feted at Cannes and has opened to rave receptions in the US, breaking box office records for first day ticket sales (for a documentary).

Michael Moore is the current bete noir of the US establishment. They see him as a hardcore Liberal, a term of opprobrium that seems, during the post-September 11th period, to have achieved the status of 'Communist' in the McCarthy era.

The film is familiar to Michael Moore fans in the sense that it uses a lot of stock footage, plenty of dodgy handheld camera work and lo-fi sound, with the appalling music not really suited to some of the scenes. As consumers of visual media we've come to expect slick and well-directed and we just don't have it here. In a very real sense, this takes a lot away from what should be an all-consuming and powerful documentary - people who are concentrating on trying to hear dialogue tend to lose focus on the visual content.

A lot of time in the film (it's around 104 minutes) is wasted on showing the various members of the Bush entourage preparing for interview, including one memorable scene of Paul Wolfowitz sucking his comb and using spit to keep his hair in place, Bush playing golf and Bush just apparently staring into the middle distance. This is fine because it shows the gang up for the bunch of pompous and sometimes vacuous lowlives that they are - but it doesn't really add to the substance of the film and that's what a film like this should be all about - content.

And now we come to the heart of the film and the reason why most of us will see it; because it's the question we're all still asking - why did the US really go to war against Iraq?

The viewer is forced to make a number of assumptions before watching the film - the main one of which is that al-Quaeda was responsible for the World Trade Centre attack. If this is true and if Osama bin Laden is the leader of al-Quaeda, why were the entire US-based contingent of the bin Laden family allowed to fly out of the States and into Saudi Arabia two days AFTER the WTC attack, when, remember, ALL commercial and private flights were grounded?

The reason - and here we find ourselves firmly in Michael Moore territory - seems to be that the Bush family are inextricably tied in to bin Laden and Saudi Arabian business interests. In fact the whole US economy seems to be reliant on Saudi business interests; $860bn is invested in US business - a cool six or seven percent of American equity - and a trillion dollars of Saudi cash is tucked away in US banks. Certainly the Bush family and its friends rely on the Saudis for much of their income - $1.4bn dollars, in fact.
This is the kind of reporting that Moore is rightly famed for and when he is reviewing the appalling facts that surround and obfuscate the events of September 11th, he is at his best.

There are a whole load of interesting points brought up in the film about the fascinating relationship between the Saudi government and the hijackers who flew the planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, the Saudi government and the bin Ladens - in fact, as the film progresses, you start to wonder if the Saudi government isn't rather more closely involved than, by any standard of ethics, they should be. But that's a side issue: the apparent focus of American interest appears to be on Osama bin Laden.

The hunt for bin Laden begins in Afghanistan, which the US swamped with troops - well, perhaps 'swamped' isn't quite the right word. Eleven thousand troops were sent - less than the amount of police officers in Manhattan - and even these didn't get into the area which bin Laden had occupied until a full TWO MONTHS after September 11th. Not unexpectedly, they didn't find him.

As Moore points out, in incredulous tones, 'they gave a mass-murderer, responsible for the deaths of nearly three thousand American citizens, a two month head start?'

Immediately following this, the US administration began all the WMD lies. A montage of clips shows Bush, Baker, Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the gang stating unequivocally that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons and probably Martian death rays all over the place. The impression they give is that there's barely room to move, the country is so full of WMDs. Well, we've all seen where that argument went.

There were two defining moments in the film for me, when I felt that Michael Moore was doing what I expected him to do - and that's a good point; just what DO I expect him to be doing? What I expect when I sit down to watch a Moore film is that he will point out injustice, expose corruption and express my moral outrage, by proxy.

This he does, very clearly, when he states (to a background of the bombardment of an Iraqi town), 'On March 12th 2003, George W. Bush and the US military invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq - a nation that had never attacked the United States, a nation that had never threatened to attack the United States, a nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.'

But the second moment was the clincher - the one that said in all, in my opinion, and the one that should go down in history as precisely what the invasion of Iraq was all about. In the middle of the war, Microsoft, DHL and other corporations, invited Halliburton to a conference to figure out how much money could be made in Iraq. The speaker is Youssef Sleiman of Harris Corporation.

'Now lots of you are small businesses and you're struggling. How do we get a piece of this big action? All of the big guys are going to get it and the rest of us will have sub-contracting capability or none at all...Once that oil starts flowing and money coming in, there's going to be lots of money. That's the second-largest reserve of oil in the world. There's no question about how much money's there...And it's going to get better. Start building relationships because it's going to get much better as the oil flows and the budget increases and the good news is, whatever it costs, the government will pay you.'

This is my main problem with the film. Yes, it's dramatic, yes, it tells the story in an acceptable way, yes, a lot of the scenes are harrowing and disturbing (particularly of the dead and injured) and yes, Moore makes the points he feels he needs to make. But he doesn't tell us anything we don't already know or at least already believe we know.

That the story of the invasion of Iraq is one that stinks of the corruption that surrounds the US administration and big business is known to everyone who is likely to go and see it. The fact that everyone was lied to about the existence of WMDs is known and largely ignored by everyone except the radical media and those who opposed the war in the first place.

This is the key problem with Fahrenheit 9/11 - it tells me nothing real that I don't already know. As the story of a President whose hands are clearly soaked in oil and blood, it's acceptable but I have to ask, 'So what?'

Ketlan
ketlan@gmail

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Farenheit 9/11 will be screened at the Dukes for several nights from 10 September 2004.