Battle in Seattle: Critic Reviews

It sounds like a bad TV movie, yet Stuart Townsend, the veteran actor-turned-director re-creates it all with stunning passion and skill in Battle in Seattle.

But a drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

Townsend smothers any sense of global immediacy by covering the action with a frayed patchwork of melodramatic coincidences,

It's like a class play by the Students for a Democratic Society.

The drama gets heavy-handed at times, but the film is a triumph, thanks to a crack cast including Connie Nielson, stunning as a TV reporter who joins her subjects in protest.

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same.

... will leave you slightly better informed than two hours spent staring at a wall.

One strength is Barry Ackroyd's handheld-camera work, which deftly tracks the action but still captures the disorientation of those engulfed by the mayhem.

Effectively mixing original broadcast and amateur vid footage (especially during scenes of crowd panic and police brutality) with interwoven fictive strands, Townsend acquits himself well, if not outstandingly, as both writing and directing newbie.

Less notable is the soap-ish plot, which leans heavily on coincidence and melodrama.

Actor-turned writer-director Stuart Townsend makes great use of the documentary footage of the '99 Seattle WTO riots. And he gets across his talking points about this shadowy outfit, too. It's a shame his script and all his actor friends get in the way.

If current events hold, Battle in Seattle could look like prophecy as well as history.

Approaching its subject with a neat idealism and packaging its political fervor in the most facile of forms, the film boasts a cast loaded with Hollywoods both new and old and wraps its message up with eye-rolling naivete.

There is a monster in Battle in Seattle, but it never speaks and remains mysterious.

While it makes no bones about where its sympathies lie, these fictional stories show a genuine fascination with the role politics plays on both sides of such confrontations and how things can spin out of control with no single person to blame.

It's easy to see why Townsend was attracted to this inherently dramatic situation, but the characters he's put on screen feel less like real people than like entities created to either make plot points or stand in for specific positions.

Battle in Seattle is a childish, ineffectively manipulative piece of self-serious agitprop about the four-day World Trade Organization meetings in 1999.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Stuart Townsend would have been better off keeping things on a more modest scale. There are just too many characters here.

This is a powerful, wrenching and impressive writing and directing debut for the talented actor, definitely now a triple showbiz threat.

What I think the movie failed to do was the thing it had to do most, which was explain what is the WTO and why in Stuart Townshend's opinion, is it bad.

It sheds much needed light on a mostly forgotten event in our country's history.

Townsend's efforts to be honest to the spirit of the event carry the film through its sloganeering and familiar backstage dramas.