Battle in Seattle (2007)

(In French, On TV, November 2022) I clearly remember the 1999 “Battle in Seattle.” Oh, I wasn’t there—but I was following the news quite closely at the time. You have to remember (or learn, if you’re young enough) that, in the dull late-1990s, the putative end-of-history feeling had led to a growing anti-corporatist movement that felt like the next logical step—democracy had vanquished authoritarianism, so the next step was to clean house and reinforce democracy. The Battle in Seattle, in which protesters took aim at corporatist targets, was the clearest sign of that brewing conflict and, in retrospect, its high-water mark. Because then, conveniently, September 2001 rolled around and suddenly corporations weren’t as bad as some of the other bad actors out there. But never mind alternate historical paths not taken, because Battle in Seattle is an attempt to present some of those events in a largely pseudo-documentary format, using an ensemble cast to cover a variety of perspectives on those few days in Seattle. In retrospect, there’s a heck of a cast at work here: Actors such as André Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, Connie Nielsen, Michelle Rodriguez, Channing Tatum and Charlize Theron all have something to do here, crossing the lines to show the protests, the arrests and their immediate aftermath. Written and directed by Stuart Townsend (an actor who peaked around 2000 and went in a decade-plus eclipse following Battle in Seattle), the film takes a gritty approach whenever it can, not going for flashy set-pieces as much as a ground-level view of everything as it happened. It’s generally successful at that ambition, although the inevitable flip side of such an approach is obvious: Battle in Seattle can often feel like an educational special in action, all history with a bit of drama to tie everything together. Still, it’s a good (if under-seen) capture of a specific moment in recent history, and one that should be remembered more vividly.