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Director:
Robert Greenwald

Release: 20 Aug. 04
IMDb

I was a vocal critic of Gulf War II from the beginning. The minute the administration began moving away from United Nations weapons inspections in what seemed like a buildup to an inevitable. I was offended by the way people tried to portray this as a way to rid the country of weapons when the inspections for those weapons hadn’t been finished. My decision of who to support in the election of 2004 was in the air up to that point -- ever since, I’ve known exactly who I wasn’t voting for.

But that doesn’t mean that I can accept a haphazardly put together film essay portraying my own worries about the war. Uncovered: The War on Iraq has something to say, but knows very little about how to say it. The film makes it clear that there are many important people to speak against the war, but their collected insights lose much of the impact because the directors jump between the many voices in a poorly laid-out attempt to show the unanimity of the anti-war movement among these CIA, UN, FBI, NSA, and administration officials.

Ultimately, there’s little in Uncovered that I haven’t seen or heard many times before. Most of the people interviewed have the credentials (the film makes that clear by opening on three dozen faces telling about themselves), but their interviews are shot in different formats with different sound quality to make the experience seem amateurish. I never thought I’d consider Michael Moore a superior filmmaker, but in this case our man from Flint is Orson Welles.