TECHNICAL QUALITY: DVD
Despite an excellent ensemble cast; including Angelina JOLIE and Irrfan KHAN, and superb performances from all concerned, this story exists in a political vacuum.
How we got to where we are now is only thinly-sketched using the standard White, Western claim that the 21st century began on 9/11. This tells us nothing about the ongoing racewar between East and west and why, for example, the rules of the political game keep changing but the game remains the same.
By trivializing world politics, in this way, the story of a wife’s grief at the loss of her husband to international terrorism is also trivialized and rendered melodramatic – despite the documentary styling of the film itself. The characters become ciphers that exist to represent a specific political point-of-view rather than a specific psychology. The fear, as always, lies in seeing too much into the actions of ones enemies and finding that they are actually justified and that you are not: That the Terrorist is actually a Freedom Fighter. Because of this the theme remains the unimportant one of not being terrorized, cowed or made bitter by grief and loss, when the real issue is to minimize the loss in the first place.
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