h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I realise this will have had limited viewing being probably only available to those who can get a hold of the More 4 channel but the film / semi-documentary fiction was broadcast this evening at 9 and again at 10; so I was curious if anyone else saw it and what you thought of it.

I found it a compelling and interesting drama that presented a tantalisingly possible event in a eerily off-centre kind of way. The paranoia and bias on display from the law enforcement professionals in pursuit of the assassin goes to the heart of what makes the creeping new authoritarianism post September 11th 2001 so pernicious and worrying in the UK, the US and elsewhere. I thought the film did a decent job of capturing that.

The whodunnit retrospective aspect gives the story it's structure and the ending is a surprise because of where it leaves the audience at the end. In some ways a very sympathetic re-telling of the assassins styory that gets away from the Lee-Harvey Oswald grand conspiracy (or not) on display in films such as JFK. I suspect however that the subject matter of the film is going to be highly contrvaersial in some quarters. I particularly thought the matter of race was an interesting choice on the part of the film-makers.

Clive.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/

Sorry, I was left pretty cold by it all. It brought nothing fresh to the table.

Nothing at all? I'm surprised

Too many holes.

Syrian guy - wife says he's totally innocent, then says he was at an Al Quaeda training camp but it was all a big mistake. When arrested the Syrian isn't surprised and certainly doesn't protest his innocence too much. It had a lot of fun undermining fingerprint evidence and forensics.

I saw about half an hour of it, during the second half. Two things struck me

1) The sheer logistical nightmare that the cops had trying to find everyone who was a potential suspect, then interview them and so on.

2) The evidence they had on the assassin was hardly incontrovertible, but there was no doubt that he'd get convicted. Seemed very true to life, that bit. As did the 'Patriot 3' bill that got passed through Congress or the Senate.

I think it was the same team who made a similar docu-drama about a fire at an oil refinery in the States and the enormous and wide-ranging ramifications it had. I liked that and I quite liked the tone of this one too, although it's a sensitive topic, to say the least. I'll probably watch it in full when it's on again.

Well I'll lay my cards on the table I thought the really interesting part was


*spoilers.*
















having the assassin as the (first) gulf-war veteran father who is so lost to grief that he plans to kill the president. I liked the fact that it united both gulf wars as providing the context for his decision both becuase of his own problems and the loss of a son in this current conflict. The red herring of the elder brother and the pride of the mother in not reading the suicide note confession were also I thought interesting dramatic touches which I'll coem back to.

I realised fairly early on that the muslim suspect would have to very sail close to being the possiblre assassin only for a new candidate to emerge out of left field later on. I suppose perhaps it wasn't brilliantly handled since you point it out. The list of charges such as flying to flying to Pakistan etc was a bit clumsy but it underlined I thought the an important fact was that he was afterall innocent of the crime of which he was accused but those other contributng factors from his past whilst not making him necessarily a sympethetic character ought not to have confirmed his guilt either. That that fact got past the bullish fbi officer interviewing him, as well as the court system that tried him, was the point I thought that episode was trying to make; not helped necessarily then by the lengths to which the writers went to muddy the waters in setting that up.

The point about race I thought was interesting and I've not thought long and hard about this so pick me up on this if you will but I thought it was very interesting that the writers chose to make the assasin a black american, not a hispanic or a muslim or even the briefly dangled white surpremicist, but supposedly the most settled and integrated of the non-white races in america.

A point I thought underlined particularly by the mother speaking about her family and their military service which was, as it turned out, the source of the fathers rage that turned him into the assassin in the first place.




















*spoilers*



















It was not a truth telling factual documentary , but a fiction and I think appraoched purely on that basis there was some things of interest there amongst the obvious political comment.