This Easter, my family and I went to the movies as our event that we do together as a family. My mother and brother went to go see "Zootopia," while my dad and I went to go see "London Has Fallen." Now, before you get too into it, this analysis will contain some spoilers.
Now I know that two of the actors in the movie, Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler have been in movies based somewhat around politics or law – with Freeman being in "Invictus" and Butler being in "Law Abiding Citizen" – so I had some expectation of a political theme being the undertone. Like some sort of political message being sent.
Now, the message of the story was kinda problematic in my opinion. You see, almost all (at least from what I saw) were pretty much stereotypical middle eastern people. And considering the recent air or xenophobia and islamophobia going around, I feel that this casting choice was inappropriate and misguided at best, and down right problematic at worst. It may not mean to, and this might have been simply an oversight by the casting choice, but it almost seems to perpetuate the idea of Middle Easterners being terrorists. Especially after seeing this after the Brussels Attacks, this kind of casting made me feel very uncomfortable. I know this movie was filmed and released before the attacks, but the feeling still persists. Butler's character even mutters the line, “get back to 'Fuckheadistan' or wherever it is you’re from.”
Now, this casting choice could have been more excused (not completely though) if the message I thought they were going for in the beginning held true. The message I believed until the end was that of a critique of United States policy dealing with how we use drones in the Middle East. I thought they were trying to tell us that drone usage really causes further extremism because the high chance that we end up killing innocent civilians. The attacks were prompted by the fact that we killed the family of the arms dealer during a wedding – via drones – so I was thinking this was just showing us how drones will only cause further issues and we should, if we do choose to continue operations in the Middle East, only do so using ground forces.
However, that in itself can cause problems. At the end of the movie, they choose to use a drone to end up killing the mastermind, blowing up the building he was in. This, in my opinion is almost a 180 degree turn from where I thought it was going. The theme I got from this movie was that of American Exceptionalism. That the USA is always right and justified in their actions. In this movie, the USA clearly did a bad thing when they ordered a drone strike at a wedding, killing innocent people. Albeit they had no idea there were innocents or a wedding going on when they attacked, but at the end, they again use a drone strike, showing clearly that they failed to learn from their mistake and that they felt they were in the right the whole time. And this idea is problematic, as it allows for us to justify any actions taken by the USA.
This film was nicely shot and the directing was somewhat good. But, I think that problematic nature of its casting choices is too much combined with the fact that the characters seemingly learned nothing from their actions and the underlying theme of American Exceptionalism makes me feel very uneasy.
