Review: Control Room (**)

CONTROL ROOM
A film review by Steve Rhodes

Copyright 2004 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****): **


CONTROL ROOM, by director Jehane Noujaim (STARTUP.COM), takes us inside the
control room of the infamous Al Jazeera network, to which forty million
Arabs turn every day for their news. Al Jazeera is widely known to be
biased and scandalous, but the documentary about it manages to be biased and
boring, without any story arc or drive.



Organized chronologically, the movie starts and ends with the Iraqi war in
2003. The film's central thesis, that Al Jazeera is an objective teller of
the truth hidden by the American media, is never convincingly argued. One
of the Al Jazeera producers lets the real cat out of the bag when she
admits, "The word 'objectivity' is almost a mirage." More typical is one of
the Al Jazeera executives who proudly boasts that Al Jazeera provides "the
only true journalism in the world" with the images they broadcast. But the
real extent of that exec's loyalty to the Al Jazeera brand of reporting is
shown when he admits that he'd quit in a heartbeat if Fox News made him a
better offer.



The movie has numerous cuts to intertitles, which display relatively mundane
facts in big bold letters that suggest they are much more dramatic and
important that they are. It's a way to pump up a fairly flaccid
documentary.



About the only time the somber film introduces any humor is in the affair of
the missing card deck. Reporters are shown going into a feeding frenzy
after the military spokesman displays a deck of playing cards with the
most-wanted images on them. The press is furious that there aren't decks
immediately available for them.



What really makes Al Jazeera angriest of all is when one of their reporters
dies in the battle. Although he was where the military told him not to be,
the network believes that he was targeted.



Although during the war, Al Jazeera had time to run pictures of injured
children almost non-stop, they didn't have time to explore what bringing
democracy to Iraq might mean to its people after years of living under
Saddam Hussein's repressive and brutal regime.



CONTROL ROOM runs 1:24. The film is in English and in Arabic with English
subtitles. It is not rated but would be R for war violence and would be
acceptable for teenagers.



The film is playing in nationwide release in the United States now. In the
Silicon Valley, it is showing at the Camera Cinemas.



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