On the morning November 2, 2007, 21-year old Meredith Kercher's lifeless body was discovered in the room of a house that she shared with 3 other women while attending school as part of the Erasmus student exchange program in Perugia, Italy. She'd only been in Perugia a few months. One of the housemates present at the scene of discovery was 20-year old Amanda Knox of Seattle, Washington, also a student and the person from whom this Netflix documentary takes it's name.
Can't say that I was really looking forward to watching this, especially after finding out that it's producers were somewhat deceptive in their claims of showing what they had said would be an unbiased and neutral take in what has been one of the most divisive cases to emerge in the age of the internet and social media. Turns out they'd been advocates for Knox's innocence since at least 2011, when Judge Pratillo Hellmann acquitted Knox and co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito at their first appeal. Why not state your pro-innocence bias upfront? Nothing wrong with that, if you truly believe it, but why state otherwise? And why also state you've got new revelations about the case when you really don't? In fact there was more left out than was put in, but then 90 minutes couldn't possibly cover the roller-coaster of the 3-tiered Italian judiciary system, so the documentary must be selectively streamlined. And boy was it. In a week that started with the first 2016 Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the question rises about the inability of the news media to "fact-check", "Amanda Knox" finishes the week off with the same question; Did anybody bother to fact-check? Sure, there's a few facts sprinkled here and there, but they're mostly sugar-coated or given short thrift. But short thrift on facts is one thing, glaring omissions of them is another. People are given short thrift as well, most noticeably Meredith Kercher. The documentary almost treats her like an inconvenience to the main story of superstar celebrity Amanda Knox, who herself can't even get facts straight and contradicts her own documented statements several times throughout. Her personal script seems to change almost as much as her alibis did in 2007. And then there's her on screen, um, presence. She doesn't really have any and looks uncomfortable, all the while making her come across as very unlikable. How much is acting and how much is real emotion? With Knox it's hard to tell. Same goes goes for Knifeboy, excuse me, Sollecito. He's almost as unlikable as Knox. And was he stoned when they filmed his interviews? As for Nick Pisa, I had him pegged for scummy trash-journalist years ago and the documentary confirms this, but I don't think the makers of "Amanda Knox" realized that they would be proving his point as well. They're actually doing what he'll be blamed for and that's creating a "story" to mislead while omitting facts (like the fact that Italy's highest court did not exonerate Knox by any means, but that's another documentary) in order to grab headlines and cheap soundbites. The words are different, but the story's the same. They also don't quite pull off their efforts in dichotomy with Giuliano Mignini. The uninformed will see him as the other main villain, but anyone who has followed this tragic case knows better. Overall, "Amanda Knox" is a bad piece of Pubic Relations propaganda that certainly won't sway anyone who believes that Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede all participated in the murder of Meredith Kercher, but will certainly convince the selfie generation that, "OMG, she's so totally innocent, I can't believe it". And neither do I.
