Shadow World

What a shocking load of rubbish! Living in South Africa, I always had respect for Andrew Feinstein when he exposed the arms deal scandal allegedly involving the SA government and major foreign arms manufacturers. But having now seen this "evidence", I can finally understand why the many official commissions of inquiries held about this matter over many years came to nothing.

Never having read Feinstein's book, I was hoping to uncover some coherence of his accusations in this film, but alas all we got was flimsy uncoordinated conspiracy theories spoken by mostly loose canons, without any real facts, or proof, whatsoever. The dots could not be connected! A great pity as I believe that the underlying theme of the movie is correct, but what's the point if such story is completely unbelievable, bordering on pure imagination, and actually counterproductive?

The truth is out there but not in this depiction.

This is a compelling and interesting film but also a worthy and ultimately disappointing one. Like an Adam Curtis documentary it creates an atmospheric and morbid mood with poetry readings, synth-music and distorted images which aren't always directly related to the story. The opening twenty minutes establishes its calm-but-furious tone as the film reflects on a century of cyclical conflict ruminated on by interviewees. A pretty good start. But as the film continues it drifts more and more away from its central subject which is surely about the arms trade.

If one is being generous, you can argue that it's also about the behind-the-scenes 'diplomacy' and kickbacks which grease the wheels of the military-industrial complex, in which leaders claim to be trying to solve the world's problems but really just perpetuate them. This argument is nothing new, though, and deflects away from directly addressing the key subject: weapons, and why the arms trade is more immoral than, say, oil, food, drugs, water, shipping etc.

The film-makers line-up an interesting array of subjects including a roistering arms-salesman who you love-to-hate. That salesman sticks out because he's the only one who talks in-depth about corruption relating to gunrunning. The rest discuss the West's suppression of freedom in favour of its own interests. I had a lot of sympathy for them, especially Chris Hedges, but because of the way they are interviewed (the film-maker's fault) they only contribute to the documentary's sprawl. The producers should have spoken to people from H&K, FN Herstal, BAE, Rolls-Royce, Raytheon and so on. But apart from the afore-mentioned arms-dealer, the interviewees all support the film's point-of-view. An opening quote states humans aren't made of atoms, but of stories. This credo carries throughout the film and means we hear stories which have a specific place in history but do not add up to precise, focused documentary and make instead a vague anti-war philosophy.

In the end, the film looks are though it was overwhelmed by its own depression and broods on the horror created by the arms trade, not the trade itself. It also fails to make an important point: what can be done to make the arms trade more ethical and its agents more accountable? I don't know and although this film is worth watching, it won't help you understand better.

There is nothing new about the documentary, all of what is said is already known. But what this movie does is tie the ends and shows you how western corporations and countries such US/UK and Israel benefits from the sectarian violence in middle east. Orchestrate and perpetuate war and sit back and collect benjamins.

Watch it and you be the judge.

I started watching this, but gave up after twenty minutes after having lost belief something interesting was still being kept from me.

Going back to the initial promise, it claims to be a) a documentary, and b) to give an insight into international arms trade. But it does neither.

A documentary gives you facts. Laid out in a sequential or chronological order, so one can form its own opinion on the data being presented. Alas, that's not happening here. On arms trade, you get little or no info. Instead, you get a rather idiosyncratic collection of news snippets and interviews with self-declared investigative journalists, mixed with footage of world leaders, retrieved from their context, with a clear intention of blackening them. It makes you wonder if the documentary maker understands how the world works, and the tough choices its leaders need to make.

Clearly the intention was not to make a factual documentary. It's the usual leftish rubbish by that class who believes the people need to be told on what they are allowed to think, because they can definitely not be trusted to think for themselves.

If you do want to get a good insight into arms trade, I'd rather recommend the 'How Rolls- Royce Bribed Its Way Around the World' episode of BBC Panorama. Factual and concise, it will tell you ten times more on the topic, in five times less time.

I just saw this truthful expose on Danish television (DR2 March 18) and thought of how all these wars the US and UK conduct in large part for the gouging profit of their war weaponry capitalist firms just doesn't happen in Russia. How Putin is so clearly working assiduously for world peace while his counterparts in the USA/UK are doing what they can to find excuses to war against Russia. It matters little what anyone in the West thinks of "democracy", "free speech", "free press", "honest elections" that occur or do not occur in Russia or anywhere else--what about the UK/USAs great friends in Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States and, of course, Israel. What really matters to West citizens as well as all of the planets peoples is whether the US/UK will blow up the world to please war industry's profits. Maybe they have plans to fly to the moon with their cash. When will the Western people wake up and stop this war industry, the military-corporate consort from killing and killing, torturing and torturing? When will the media do its job of watching over the powerful and informing real news to the citizenry? When will we demand such and let Putin win all the elections that clearly the majority of Russians want him to? Can one say the same for any US/UK president or prime minister, can one say they have the vast majority of the citizenry behind them?