Director:
Robert Greenwald
Release: 20 Aug. 04
IMDb
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Uncovered: The War on Iraq
BY: DAVID PERRY
I was a vocal critic of Gulf War II from the beginning. The
minute the administration began moving away from United Nations weapons
inspections in what seemed like a buildup to an inevitable. I was offended
by the way people tried to portray this as a way to rid the country of
weapons when the inspections for those weapons hadn’t been finished. My
decision of who to support in the election of 2004 was in the air up to that
point -- ever since, I’ve known exactly who I wasn’t voting for.
But that doesn’t mean that I can accept a haphazardly put together film
essay portraying my own worries about the war. Uncovered: The War on Iraq
has something to say, but knows very little about how to say it. The film
makes it clear that there are many important people to speak against the
war, but their collected insights lose much of the impact because the
directors jump between the many voices in a poorly laid-out attempt to show
the unanimity of the anti-war movement among these CIA, UN, FBI, NSA, and
administration officials.
Ultimately, there’s little in Uncovered that I haven’t seen or heard many
times before. Most of the people interviewed have the credentials (the film
makes that clear by opening on three dozen faces telling about themselves),
but their interviews are shot in different formats with different sound
quality to make the experience seem amateurish. I never thought I’d consider
Michael Moore a superior filmmaker, but in this case our man from Flint is
Orson Welles.
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