Review of Battle in Seattle (2007) by Brendan H — 30 Oct 2008

Battle in Seattle covers a very important event in American history, but it's message can connect with the rest of the world perfectly. Since it's such an important topic, it takes quite the talent to bring it to life and it seems that actor Stuart Townsend met that challenge in his directoral debut, and he's got a bunch of fine actors leading this powerful mesh of artists.

I'm just gonna get the negative stuff out of the way, because the good outweights the bad in this film. When watching Battle in Seattle, don't expect a whole lot of deep characters who you feel like you've known forever by the end. The film has to cover a lot of ground in under two hours, so there wasn't a whole lot of time to create memorable people. But I'll tell you why this actually isn't too bad of a thing after all, later. Battle in Seattle is also one for the patient folk, especially because of the third act. The movie is intense throughout, but it stretches just a tiny bit too long in my opinion to keep that intensity the whole movie.

I mentioned above that the fact there are a whole bunch of characters in it that we really don't know much about them, and that actually helps the movie in total. Battle in Seattle would've been slow with the narrative focusing on only one point in the conflict, and these multiple storylines not only shed more light on the subject, but it helps keep the story moving along and keeping it interesting. Each story is also extremely fascinating, especially the one of Charlize Theron's character, who represents the bystanders who did nothing wrong, but were still hurt for it. Of course, hers is even more dramatic than the casual person, but it's still quite relatable and devestating to watch. The protestors and cops stories are also great too. but the person who's caught in the middle is usually more interesting. Battle in Seattle also maintains this gripping and intense feel to it, creating an authentic feel to the experience. The way how it's filmed is tremendous in scope and extremely powerful, sometimes a little too hard to handle, to realise that happened not too long ago.

Battle in Seattle is an important film to watch, it tells of something that needs to discussed and does that with a bang. Thanks to the right director and cast, it goes farther than I could've imagined and should not be missed.