i certainly appreciate this film’s urgency. it wants nothing more than to be watched now, right now. so that’s pretty exciting and bold right there.
unfortunately i think they squandered a lot of their uniqueness. they have an incredible resource in steidle - one of the few people with firsthand experience and knowledge of the events - but instead of really delving into that knowledge they lean more on his emotional response to the larger matters surrounding what he saw. i really don’t care, for example, what he thinks fits the definition of genocide - i care about what he saw very specifically. especially in the setup when they’re spelling out the conflict they spend way too much time with the bbc reports and steidle narrating all the big stuff that was happening. they finally get to a couple specific incidents and they’re very interesting and could have easily spent an hour just on those. but as it is we end up with just a montage of burned bodies and faces and it becomes the stereotypical western coverage of african tragedy.
ultimately i’m just not the right audience for this. the final parts of him on speaking tours and talking about not being naive anymore do fit in with the beginning and make for a complete journey of the american. for someone who hasn’t really followed the situation it might be interesting to get his perspective, but otherwise it did just sound very naive along the way.
also they went way overboard with the video filters, and i think audio too, to the point where i was really suspicious of what i was seeing and hearing. and again, when you’ve got this amazing authentic source like seidle that’s a big fumble - why get in the way of authenticity? but again they were really going for a different audience and put a lot of slickness on everything to make it more palatable.
