Review of The Dissident (2020) by Jeeap — 31 Jan 2021

Below par documentary, with unsettling reverence for corporatism and totalitarisme.

The film brings nothing new to the core story of khashoggi´s last days. Even if you didn't follow the story closely, the basic understanding of the story, that most of the world got through osmosis won't be challenged or expanded upon here.

Beside the trivial retelling of the sequence of events, the film tells the story a young Saudi activist. Which leads into short descriptions of troll-armies and the modern role of social media.

This is the only interesting part of the documentary, but it also leads into some major problems. To celebrate platforms like Twitter and Youtube, know for their mass censorship of anyone who doesn't all align with their political ideology - in a movie that is at its core about free speech - is spine-chilling.

The dissonance between watching a film dealing with totalitarisme and censorship while being subjected to a a corporate propaganda product is unsettling.

This feeling is only made worse as the movie start to idolize Jeff Bezos for cancelling an investment in Saudi Arabia, without ever bringing up why he would invest in a inhumane dictatorship in the first place. Just like it's never brings up how books challenging the corporate-democrat views are systematically purged from his Amazon sites. Or how his employees are treated.

Finally the obligatory Trump-bashing is ofcourse baked into this corporate product. Pretending that decades of arms and war profiteering is somehow a right or left wing question, or has to do specifically with the current administration is just insulting to the viewers. And a total misrepresentation of the issue.

It seems that everything from documentaries to comic-book-movies need to incorporate the same MSNBC talking-points to be produced in Hollywood today.

As a consequence the Dissident feels very much like every other hollow, mass produced hollywood product.