Australia's Best Movie Magazine

Film reviews

Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

search the site

Enter search term:

newsletter

Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter

Enter search term:

The War You Don’t See (Film)

by Emmet O'Cuana | March 30, 2011 14:20 | Edited March 30, 2011 16:52

A timely exploration into the media’s coverage of war, which is both insightful in its analysis and passionate in its need to safeguard honest investigative journalism.

The War You Don't See is first and foremost a defence of the integrity of investigative journalism. Opening with an unedited segment of footage, depicting a group of unknown men in Iraq being mowed down from above by a hail of bullets, the audience is given no clue as to the identities of these people. All that is left is the visceral shock of deaths and the monotonous order on the video, ‘Keep shooting...Keep shooting.'

 

Welcome to the era of Wikileaks, where raw data has eclipsed the role of the trusted journalist and television broadcaster. Aussie journalist John Pilger sets about interviewing several journalists and news editors, who were all, to one extent or another, involved in promoting the case for the war in Iraq.

 

Former BBC journalist Rageh Omaar, former writer for The Observer David Rose, and retired broadcasting icon Dan Rather from CBS all agreed to be interviewed. Rather in particular becomes quite emotional when he argues that had firmer questions been asked of heads of state in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is likely that the Western forces would not currently still be tied up in two simultaneous ‘long wars.'

 

Of course, none of this is new. Pilger roots his argument of the complicity of media with political spin as far back as World War I. What has changed more recently is the aggression with which government responds to criticism. Again and again, Pilger's subjects discuss their fear of losing their jobs, or suffering further sanction as a result of saying the wrong thing.

 

This is a powerful piece of film polemic, which joins the likes of Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares and Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed, in its condemnation of the lies being sold to the public through the media. The War You Don't See is passionate, insightful and convincing in its defence of the importance of trustworthy journalism.