EDGE San Francisco

After World War II, the World Trade Organization was proposed as a means of helping maintain global peace and stability. But instead of concentrating on the good of the world’s people, the Stuart Townsend docu-drama Battle in Seattle tells us, the WTO began to place the profits of multinationals ahead of the needs of the citizens of the group’s member nations.

The November, 1999 battle between police and protesters that took place in Seattle during a meeting of the World Trade Organization pitted two sides against one another; the bad news is that it didn’t make any difference to the WTO’s rich, removed leaders, and indeed, the two sides fighting it out on the streets belonged on the same side: that of ordinary men and women. This film says as much, but without much poetry.

Battle in Seattle is based on true events, but fictionalizes the characters whose experiences unfold against the backdrop of the protests that greeted the Seattle meeting of the WTO in November, 1999. Most of the movie concerns events on the ground, where protesters clashed with police in riot gear, which is too bad: a more critically useful look at the WTO might have been set in the secured hotel where the delegates hunkered down, insulated from the chaos outside.

More dramatically compelling than cops moving in with swinging truncheons (an image that, for better or worse, we’ve gotten accustomed to since the sixties) is the chaos that we glimpse when the film moves indoors, and off the teargas-choked streets: an African delegate (Issach de Bankole) attempts to air the grievances of his, and other, poor nations, only for the white guys seated above him to confer in whispers and shut him down; a delegate from Doctors Without Borders (Rade Serbedzija) seeks to prove his case that the sick are dying while pharmaceuticals companies get rich, and holding the attention of a scant few other delegates--until his outrage overcomes his sense of decorum and he lets loose with a hectoring sermon. (Bored-looking white guys drift out the door even as he bellows at them, but his passion gives the movie a much-needed lift.)

The WTO, we are essentially told, is a consortium of rich guys getting richer and letting the world’s most vulnerable and impoverished perish... even as they loot the landscape, pollute the environment, and drive the middle class toward the ranks of those poor people the WTO leaders care nothing about. It all sounds weary, if altogether too plausible, and the movie lacks the freshness of spirit to do more than engage a reflexive sense of insult that dissipates into resignation when the movie ends up telling us that things are no better now than they were nine years ago--except, that is, for the WTO elite, who now meet behind miles-wide buffer zones, so as not to be inconvenienced by the people who worry that their lives are so much fodder to the group.

Townsend, who co-wrote and directed the film, may know a thing or two about conspiracies, given his stint (albeit brief) as Carl Kolchak on the short-lived ABC reboot of The Night Stalker a couple of years ago. His film, however, has the feel of a biodegradable jigsaw puzzle: you know just where each large, day-glo piece is supposed to fit, and predicting how the paths of various characters will intersect--Woody Harrelson’s seasoned Seattle cop, for instance, is destined to clash with Martin Henderson’s principled protester--is distressingly easy.

Henderson’s character, Jay, is all the more invested in green causes given that he’s paid a price in blood toward the ecologically friendly, if industry-hostile, movement: Jay’s brother, we learn was fatally shot while trying to protect old-growth forest. (We don’t learn more than this, and it would help if we had: who did the shooting, and why? Was there an investigation, and it so, was justice served?)

Jay is courting Lou (Michelle Rodriguez), who is presented as a perpetually angry young woman, though her rage is nebulous; she used to be an anarchist, and sometimes she still wishes she were one.

Meantime, the media cannot distinguish between groups like Jay’s and the true anarchists, who take the promise of Seattle Mayor Jim Tobin (Ray Liotta) as license to smash windows and spray-paint the walls of upscale businesses downtown. Once the mayor surrenders to the need to impose martial law (and buckles to the pressure of the governor, played by Tzi Ma, who worries that the President is going to cancel his visit to the city), riot cops, some of whom are too eager by far to crack heads, are turned loose on the unarmed crowd.

This is bad news for Ella (Charlize Theron), the pregnant wife of Harrelson’s armor-clad cop, who is stranded out on the streets because public transportation has abruptly been suspended. Ella’s left to the mercy of drifting clouds of teargas and cops bludgeoning everyone in sight.

Meantime, a gentle, determinedly upbeat wildlife advocate (André Benjamin: his character, Django, is a turtle-lover) does more than the angry Jay to hold things together. Django already knows that the good guys have lost, and now it’s simply a matter of the bad guys finishing off the world’s last wild and beautiful places and demolishing what’s left of the social compact while they are at it; but why let that get you down?

Django’s sunny, Zen presence, and the group’s lawyer, Sam (Jennifer Carpenter), are the best of an otherwise shallowly drawn cast of characters. Sam is idealistic and yet practical, sympathetic but tough: even faced with the seething mayor, Sam keeps her cool and sticks to her guns. Shes wise to the ways of the world, and yet has resisted the impulse to fall too far into either camp and lose sight of the larger picture.

If only the rest of the movie had Sam’s sense of self-possession. The film veers from polemic to melodrama and back again, lacking shape and pacing. There’s no doubting the need for the questions the film raises--namely, how did we ever give up our heritage of self-determination to what amounts to a rapacious world government of corporations? And how do we get out from under its boot-heel?--but raising such questions won’t help much unless the filmmaker is also prepared to offer answers to go along with the anguish.