Cyre2067
The Living Force
Saw this movie tonight and it was quite a shock. I did cry quite a lot, and for me that is unusual - though it does seem to be occurring with more and more frequency of late. A good sign I think. There is some residual, "Come'on stop crying...." and oddly associated shame which I was able to get a glimpse at. Anyway here's my review.
Published on my blog. Comments there are welcome and are always appreciated.Cyre said:
Emotionally powerful, stunning, shocking, and able to bring you to tears, Rendition is a film about a very real, very factual policy of my government. The movie opens with an suicide bombing in some Middle Eastern country. We then follow the extraordinary rendition of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, husband, father, and chemical engineer. He is tangentially connected to the bombing, since his cell phone was seemingly called by one of the terrorists. He passes a lie detector test, he has no prior history of involvement with terrorism, nothing in his record or any other evidence connecting him. Yet he is rendered to a far away land, kept and tortured.
Throughout the film we also follow the story of the interrogator, a man seemingly possessing a conscience, but believing his work is necessary in order to save lives. He tortures people for information. He is also a father of two girls, and a husband. His eldest daughter was to be married to a man of his choosing, disagreeing, and falling in love with another boy from her school, she runs away from home and never returns.
We also witness Anwar's wifes tragic attempt to discover what has happened to her husband. We watch and hope, but see her parried left and right by bureaucracy all in the name of 'national security'.
I won't spoil it, because I believe this is a movie that needs to be seen. Allow me to explain why. In graphic detail, the movie demonstrates what exactly our government does. We watch as Anwar is stripped and beaten, crammed into a hole in the ground, kept nude and malnourished. We also watch as he is denied access to a lawyer, a court, a phone call to his wife. Everything our four fathers have fought and died for was taken away, all that America stands for - gone, just like that. We see waterboarding and electrocution, and their 'results'.
The acting is superb, quite some of the best I've seen in a long time - by all parts. Emotion can be conveyed in a silent moment, limbic resonance is palpable; we feel what they feel. It's one thing to read about torture, extraordinary rendition, denial of habeas corpus - quite another to see it, to feel it. We've become accustomed to intellectual discourse of these things, but the truth is that they are highly emotional acts and cannot be understood without their emotional component. This movie has the potential to give its viewers that missing piece. I never knew what these things meant until I saw them with my own eyes.
Fear, sadness, confusion, anger, frustration, rage, hate, love, pain, conscience... this movie is about them all. We're shown how torture, as a state policy, breeds terrorism. How violence, begets only more violence and we're shown the pain and suffering that accompany it. How lives are destroyed, family's broken - ripped apart and torn asunder by this insanity.
FDR once said, "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." And here I beseech you dear reader to understand, this policy of our government is not intended to extract information, it's purpose was never to save lives, nor to protect our 'national security'. This policy of rendition and torture has only this purpose: to create enemies of the state - so that they can be fought ad infinitum - and to get it's victims to say what is required in order to justify more violence, more war.
I was shocked by this movie, it clearly shows what happens to men like Murat Kurnaz and thousands of other nameless, faceless victims of state policy. Innocent of any crime, they are treated in ways I cannot express in words. They are made objects, less then animals, vermin, we treat our furniture and automobiles better. This objectifying is actually a phenomenon observed in psychopaths, which demonstrates where the policy originated and who is pulling the strings.
It can't be any clearer, psychopaths rule our world. There is no compassion, nor love from our leaders, no understanding nor altruism. No desire to seek the truth and to share it. This is what they do, and unlike us they do not have a conscience. No self-doubt, no remorse, no ability to distinguish right from wrong. Until we awaken, and stop feeding their machine, this insanity will continue, claiming more lives, creating more tragedy, killing more, destroying more until it's inevitable end.
See this movie and know what it is we do to innocent people. I say we, because until we all speak up with one voice, until we all stop going to work and paying taxes, until we viscerally and seriously demand change we are all responsible. Nonviolent refusal to participate is the only way.
