Total Recall

[seriousfic]

My full review is coming up, but a brief tangent: this is another one of those movies where an evil dictator fakes terrorist attacks to justify an imperialist invasion. Guys, can we please stop with this plot? I'm starting to think some people are taking this "9/11 Truther" thing seriously. And they shouldn't, because it's stupider than the Birthers.

I mean, it's at least somewhat plausible that you could get a few guys and fake a birth certificate. They'd tell themselves it was for the good of the nation, they'd keep it under the hat, fine. Not saying it happened, obviously, but it's remotely plausible.

Bush ordering 9/11? Thousands of people working in secret to kill their fellow Americans, planting bombs in the WTC under the nose of all the people who wouldn't like bombs planted there, inventing, like, holographic missiles that look like airplanes, no one breathing a word of it to the press... and then there's the hindsight questions. Like, if Bush is willing to kill thousands of Americans to invade Iraq, wouldn't he just fake finding WMDs? Get another Republican in the White House, riding off that success? Or instead of sitting around in stunned silence when the WTC was hit, he'd be ready to jump up and look like a decisive leader (or just arrange things so he wasn't being filmed at the moment)?

Look, it's just silly and Bush has been out of office for four years, so there's not even a point to it anymore. Let's think up some new evil plots, okay?

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

How many of "those movies where an evil dictator fakes terrorist attacks to justify an imperialist invasion" made after 2001 are there? I want a list.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

I'll get back to you, but obviously, the Star Wars prequels, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and I think at least one of those Bourne wannabe movies whose name I can't remember.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

The Star Wars prequels were planned in 1999 and a fake civil war isn't really a 9/11 analogy. Given the number of assassination attempts on Padme, Lucas is clearly thinking of Kennedy like any Boomer and the entire weak parliament manipulated by evil echoes the Republican Revolution meaning Darth Sidious is a Newt Gingrich analogue.

I suspect the Bourne wannabe you are thinking of is Shooter in which a diplomat is assassinated to cover up up some secret US police/military screwup - which is the plot of an infinite number of thrillers, but is not a "dictator imperialist invasion".

"Prince of Persia" is really stretching it. Nizam, the wannabe king, uses fake evidence of weapon sales to justify the sacking of the magic city, which isn't about 9/11 but the non-conspiracy-theory issue of bogus WMD claims.

That you can't produce a list of titles shows there isn't a pattern of Truther influenced movies. Just films in which the standard plot twist of "you think the villians are this group but they are actuallly working for the real villians" which predates 9/11 and has always involved ridiculously complicated consipiracies, just like real life conspiracy theories.

To me this post seems to imply that creative types should just let it go and stop making references to the wrongs done during the Bush years. Which is annoying as 3 1/2 years ago (he left office in January 2009) isn't ancient history, those events still influence every part of our lives (including the longest war in US history which is planned to continue until 2014). Considering how long some films are in development, it's amazing there aren't more references to those years. At least the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the idea that torture doesn't work, and that's one way in which movies have improved.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

You could also say that Star Wars was all planned out in 1978, but clearly Lucas was making it up as he went (look at Jar-Jar's drastically decreased screentime as the prequels wore on). Even if he weren't, you could make the same argument that people made about the film adaptation of 300. No matter what it was intended to mean when the source material was published, the fact that it was adapted now and in the way it was has to have something to do with the political climate of the time, unless Zach Snyder lives in a box.

I wouldn't say Prince of Persia is a stretch. Isn't the claim that the magic city is allied with some group of enemies (and making weapons for them), so Ben Kingsley stirred up the initial feud to get an attack going on the "arms dealers"? (If I'm not misremembering.)

And I'm not taking issue with anti-Bush movies, more with the Truther plot device. I think everyone smart enough to be making movies knows that it's BS, so using it strikes me as a completely cynical move, like a Republican calling Obama a Muslim, knowing it's untrue, to try and stir up resistance to him. And that kind of knowingly asinine muck-raking strikes me as really damaging to any real political discourse.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

>That you can't produce a list of titles shows there isn't a pattern of Truther influenced movies.

No, it proves that he can't come up with a list off the top of his head. If it's reduced to "government or elements within it fake major attack for their own gain", then the number of goes up. PoP even draws specific parallels to the War on Terror. Shooter name-checks the JFK assassination. He also didn't mention Mission Impossible 4.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

V For Vendetta.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

That's one. This is two. That's not "those movies".

The false flag attack/disaster for political/criminal gain is a longstanding trope it existed long before 9/11, as did the idea that some historical event was staged as a pretext. It even existed before Wag The Dog. Tiresome or not, it's standard.

I have little patience with conspiracy theories overall, and I cannot stand the 9/11 truthers, but if one is going to rant against bogus theories, one should not be making bogus generalizations about patterns in movies.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

The Losers.

Machete.

I'm trying not to stretch it too much (for instance, GI Joe has terrorists plotting attacks in order to force the US to create a police state, but then also plan to replace the President so that they themselves run the police state), and there is an obvious overlap, conspiracy theory-wise, in bogus WMDs/fake terrorist attacks to create a police state/justify a war/whatever. So there won't always be 1:1 parallels, but an analogy can still be intended.

For instance, the Secret Empire plot in Captain America was clearly meant to be a metaphor for Watergate, even though not!Nixon was running a terrorist organization and not breaking into anyone's hotel. I do realize this can go into highly subjective territory, so I try not to bring it up unless there's an insultingly obvious "9/11 was an inside job!" plot, since that's my pet peeve and not general anti-Bush/war sentiment.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Also, a season or two of 24, but since that was written by Republicans, I'm not sure how you'd want to count that.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

xXx: State of the Union

Mission: Impossible 3

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Also, I think you're shifting the debate a little from "Sometimes Hollywood makes movies which use 9/11 Truth as a plot point and that's bad" to "every other movie Hollywood makes is about Bush destroying the WTC." It's not the overuse of the trope that I dislike, it's that it's used at all.

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

A few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise used that plot.

It's unquestionably become far more common (or more explicitly political) after 9/11 and Iraq.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who does actually argue against Truthers for his own inexplicable amusement, they would just ignore every single point you made and talk about their favorite "anomalies".

They can't even decide how many bad guys were involved. They say that it could be carried out with a "very small team" and make handwaves about "compartmentalization", then immediately describe schemes that would take thousands of people working together.

And I've bought up the lack of fake WMDs before. It has literally never been answered, by any variety of Truther, even the ones that believe in Space Lasers.

I'm not making that up.