All actors put effort in this, it also gives a kind message to investigate before making a statement
dont listen to the negative reviews, no doubt they express their political views
and the proof of that lies with in it
negative reviews give this movie 1 star,
1 star? even the last jedi got 7 stars, this is not fair obviously
u have time? then this worths that time
not saying this movie is a must watch just saying it definetly worths the while
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phd_travel18 September 2018Despite the A list cast and very worthy subject matter this movie about the WMD deception feels a little amateurish. There are pros and cons of the way the issues are stated clearly in more or less in sequence. The pros are you get it. The points aren't lost or mumbled so as to be missed. And there is not jigsaw puzzle narrative. That is good. Unlike Spotlight which was a bit confusing. The cons are it feels like a lecture / documentary. The best point is it puts together and illuminates the sequence of events and the WMD deception from it's early stages to the invasion and the consequences. The most eye opening thing is that these journalists were on to the deception from such an early stage and the main stream press refused to let the public know.
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This was a well done movie which succeeded in angering me all over again how this criminal administration lied America into an illegal and immoral war aided and abetted by the main stream media and supported by a gullible populace who hates to admit that they were wrong.
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Shock and Awe is a pretty good movie. Don't let the partisan sniping dissuade you from taking it in. It's worth it. Recommended.
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kosmasp30 September 2020The real life story behind what became one of the worst war mistakes a US president made. And all that just to retaliate and try to find peace. The movie has quite the strong story to dig into. That alone and how some reporters where fighting for the truth to come out is amazing enough. When everyone else was going along the line of what the president said ... they didn't.
And having the right actors to pull that off helps too. Still the absolute zinger seems to be missing. This is more than good and decent, don't get me wrong, but for those familiar with what happened and how this played out, this may feel a bit weak. Or not as strong as it could have been. Great acting overall though and the story might take you to a hopeful place. Because no matter how many times, the hopefully one term president screams and yells about the press being the enemy of the people, it just ain't true -
orpheumtheaterfairfieldia3 September 2018We had a good turn out at our little community theater in Fairfield, IA. Would screen again.
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SnoopyStyle3 February 2019This follows a group of reporters at Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau from 9/11 to the Iraq War and a young man named Adam Green who was inspired by 9/11 to join the military. John Walcott (Rob Reiner) is the bureau chief. Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) and Warren Strobel (James Marsden) are his best reporters. Almost immediately, they find various political players pushing Iraq as the culprit of 9/11. They are joined by veteran reporter Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones).
Knight Ridder's truthful reporting is an important aspect of the Iraq war buildup. The question is how to tell the well-worn story in a dramatic fashion. The movie inserts the Green family which is fine and gets one great scene with the mother asking the son to point to Afghanistan. I was more dubious about inserting a dating story which does add an interesting dad confrontation. The movie needs a villain and it sets its sights on the administration. That's fair but it's not dramatic. Nothing is new. They even use old news footage. It only re-enforces the flat, old rehashing of old news that this movie needs to avoid. There are a couple of good scenes with their publishing partners which could be the real villains. It needs to concentrate on that much more and it needs Judith Miller. She would be a perfect foil for this group and could provide some juicy controversy. They should work harder to take down the New York Times. That's the drama with the Times getting all the headlines and Knight Ridder getting the truth. -
grahamhamilton3 October 2020Very interesting subject matter, good cast. Lets tick some boxes to cover all the bases with a short side glance to some character back stories. Turned into a very shallow film, more of a low budget crowd pleaser than a quality film
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sabinblaj17 August 2018First of all, allow me to apologize for any grammar mistake in my comment.
Second, I'm from Romania (Eastern Europe) where our situation in the country is very alike the idea of the movie. Our government is making so many mistakes, trying effortlessly to justify them by social media, TV channels or any kind of press release that they have direct interest to influence peoples opinions. I was touched at the end of the movie when they presented the actual facts.
I was delighted by the actors performances. I kindly recommend you to watch this masterpiece, hoping you'll understand what real journalism is all about: searching and publishing the truth! -
Investigative reporting, until the advent of the Trump administration, has had a bad odor since Bush's invasion of Iraq. Rob Reiner's 'Shock and Awe', based on a true story, has given it new life, and is an antidote to Trump's shouting at the drop of a hat 'fake news' or the psycho babble Rupert Murdoch's Fox News serves up daily as distortions of truth and dollops of propaganda. If you're looking for the glamor and excitement of 'All the President's Men', you won't find it here. What, however, you'll find is the shoe and leather craft of investigative reporting, and why hard facts and the truth matter. 9/11 fed the hungry mouth of blind nationalism; it colored reporting, as well as it stoked the flames of revenge. Bush went to war in Afghanistan to avenge 9/11, to quash Al Qaeda and capture and kill Osama ben Laden. But he and his vice president Cheney and close advisors had another war on their mind, a war in Iraq to topple a tooth dictator Saddam Hussein and bring the fruits of US democracy to Iraqi. Rob Reiner has made a solid film of how the main stream media fell for the propaganda Bush & co fed the press and TV news. And yet, one news outlet Knight Ridder News Service didn't. And Reiner's script writer Joey Hartstone tells it as it was, cleverly andwith strong feeling and with a pen planted in reality. The film opens on two planes: John Landry (Woody Harrelson) partakes in a war game for journalists and what they should do if captured by terrorists; this before 9/11...as though it were game of Cowboys and Indians. The real drama begins of Willie Lewis (a strong Luke Tennie), a paraplegic, owing to an IED in Iraq, who wheels himself into a Congressional hearing on the Iraq War; he begins by fingering beads of data on the war to the Congressmen here assembled who look at him benignly, as a young man who signed up after 9/11 to serve his country, and then turns the tables on them and asks 'how did this happen?'And then we get into the quick of the story. Two persistent reporters Landry and Warren Strobel (James Marsden) tirelessly ply their craft to get at the truth. Rob Reiner plays the Knight Ridder managing editor John Wolcott, ably aided by a veteran journalist with 43 years of war behind him Joe Galloway, played by Tommy Lee Jones with spit and vinegar to season the relentlessness to get at the truth why Iraq? And they do it with a dedication that commands our respect, although at the time, many did not think so. As a news service Knight Ridder News served 30 odd newspapers, each one of which could choose to print or not what it got on the news wire. And in the case of the war, and here 'The Philadelphia Inquirer', a paper of heft chose not to. Nonetheless, 'Shock and Awe' deftly uses TV footage from C-Span, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, mainly to bring to our eye and ear the machinations of the Bush White House to hoodwink the US public and the world that lying pays in pursuing an Iraq War that remains opened ended in 2018. It also use headlines from the 'Washington Post', especially 'The New York Times', whose Michael Gordon and especially Judith Miller spread the Bush line on the war, that no one but Knight Ridder challenged. Equally important is the method Wolcott encouraged of talking to the little people in the government to ferret out and build a case that Bush & co. were lying through their teeth; how they perverted intelligence, killed the career Of 5 star general Colin Powell who made a fool of himself at the UN Security Council hawking aluminum tubes as proof of Hussein's travelling nuclear arsenal. The sad tale is that everyone drank the Gatorade, but Knight Ritter. Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich and Margo Moore are not taken in by the Bush lies. Equally interesting as background you see the unnamed heroes and heroines who came forward to connect the dots of this woeful story of lies, deceptions and made up facts. Ultimately, it was the disgraced Judith Miller whose words end the fil that 'Knight Ridder' was the only one that got it right'. 'Shock and Awe' probably won't do well at the box office, but it should be seen by journalism classes and school children as a learning tool of how truth matters. Reiner is a seasoned film maker and he know how to use close up, darkened room restaurants, long shoots to create a strong story line. He doesn't use 'Shock and Awe' to make us weep, but as a cautionary tale that vigilance and an informed citizenry is the price of liberty and freedom of the press.
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Prismark1015 February 2019Shock and Awe has an important message that is lost in an underwhelming even dull story.
After the 9/11 attacks, it was obvious somewhere in the middle east, a lot of people were going to die in reprisals from the USA. Much of the western media were cheerleaders in this. It did not matter if the press or television stations were conservative, liberal or meant to be neutral.
They wanted war with Afghanistan and could not wait for the invasion of Iraq. As far as journalists were concerned it was excitement. It is better to cover a battle than covering a story of complaints about street litter.
Lies and propaganda were lapped up without much critical appraisal. It was just not the US government, the UK government for example used the media to plant favourable stories that would link Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden or that Iraq had WMDs.
Directed by Rob Reiner who also stars in this. Shock and Awe is based on the true story of the reporters from Knight Ridder. Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) and Warren Strobel (James Marsden) were two reporters who called out the rubbish that was being fed to the American public in the build up to the Iraq invasion. They got flak, they got threats but they persevered and eventually vindicated some years later. Of course by then, most of the world came to believe that Iraq had no WMDs.
This should had been a sharp, hard hitting docu-drama in the style of All The President's Men. This was a clumsily told film that rehashed a history lesson.
Knight Ridder might have been proven to be right, the standards of journalism in recent years has not improved. It has gone even worse. -
The film of the expose of an impending fraud surrounding the run up to the Iraq War by the Knight Ridder News Service is itself as expose of how ignorant people were kept at the time.
And the fact no one in the GW Bush Admin carried the can for the war and no impeachment took place does not bode well for our political system, Rob Reiner's film accuratelly tell a story that few at the time wanted to know and many wanted to forget after the bloody mess was over.
It is a warning to America for the future. -
lavatch14 August 2018The true shock and awe of this film's premise is that an entire nation was duped by George W. Bush and his warmongers with a false pretext for going to war against Iraq in 2003. The focus of the film is on a tiny number of reporters for the Knight Ridder outlet, who came to believe that the Bush administration's promotion of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein was a lie.
While the reporters in the film were not of the level of tenacity of Woodward and Bernstein, the Watergate premise was precisely the goal of filmmaker Rob Reiner, who reserved the role of the crusty newspaper editor for himself.
The film opens with a quote from journalist Bill Moyers about the importance of a "diverse, independent, and free media" to a democratic society. The film is successful in demonstrating that thesis. It is also obvious that the absence of objectivity of the mainstream media is even more disgraceful today than it was in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war.
A shortcoming of the film is that it did not follow through on its premise that the Iraq war was a misguided fiasco. A number of statistics were flashed on the screen, which were used to show the tremendous costs, loss of life, and destabilization of the Middle East, leading to the main question posed by the filmmakers: "How the hell did this happen?" Yet, there are some who still stand behind the Iraq war, including current national security advisor John Bolton. While I personally agree with the filmmakers, the chaos for the people of Iraq could have been unfolded more completely in the film.
Still, the film was successful in showing how, in the climate following 9/11, there was not enough push back and dissent against the Bush administration's decision to go to war, the complaisant members of Congress who enabled him, and the pathetic effort on the part of the media to fail to explore the facts. The war in Iraq also set the tone for this nation in what has become a nearly perpetual state of war this country is fighting somewhere on the planet.
A decision to go to war was made, and the Bush administration, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, used phony evidence provided the intelligence community to support it. The key moment in the film is the Colin Powell speech before the United Nations' Security Council with CIA director George Tenet sitting in back of him. In the film, Powell was described as "the last person standing between peace and war. " Yet Powell, backed up by the arrogant Tenet, seemingly had no difficulty in spinning the yarn about WMDs. With great understatement, Powell later referred to the speech as a "blot" on his record.
Did Powell learn anything at all from his experiences in Vietnam and the doctrine that bears his name? The answer delivered in this film is a resounding "No." -
DavidBarak14 February 2021Well THAT was interesting.
It only took 15 minutes for us to learn Rob Reiner and team had a HUGE axe to grind. This wasn't a movie, it wasn't even a movie with a message, it was a message wrapped around a movie. (See notes at the end.)
Sometimes Rob Reiner is a great filmmaker and sometimes Rob Reiner isn't a great filmmaker. With Shock and Awe, Reiner failed. Every three or four minutes he found some way to hit us over the head with his moral compass (ouch). That's certainly his right, but he did it with no subtlety whatsoever, and nobody likes being force-fed someone else's opinion. When a parent teaches a child that stoves are hot, the parent doesn't put the kid's hand on the burner. Instead, the parent illustrates the heat by showing its effects on something else - a pot of boiling water, maybe, or possibly even bringing the child's hand close to the burner. But Reiner didn't do that - he put the audience's hands directly on the burner and held them there for 90 minutes. I don't know about you, but I don't like being lectured, especially for an hour and a half.
If it weren't for the profanity I'd swear this was a TV Movie of the Week, including the gentle, bittersweet music underscoring various scenes. Seriously, this played just like a made-for-TV movie. Shock and Awe was technically proficient, but that was its ONLY saving grace.
If you watch Shock and Awe, please don't mistake it for serious, skilled filmmaking. It's neither.
NOTES
1. I don't dispute Reiner's opinion of what the Bush administration did and didn't do, and the facts bear that out. I have no quarrel with Reiner in that regard.
2. I worked in the newspaper industry for many years and I can say that the general tone of the newsroom scenes, at least at times, was inaccurate. At other times, it was spot-on. There tends to be a good deal of sarcastic humor floating about newsrooms, but it's kept in check when appropriate.
3. I'm a Navy veteran, for whatever that's worth. I only mention it so my dear readers (both of you) will have a better understanding of where I'm coming from as I write this review. -
SameirAli24 March 2018December 9, 2017 14th Dubai International Film Festival.
Entering the movie with the great expectations from the Director and the great star cast, may always let you down.
The movie is about a group of journalists during the most notorious 9/11 disaster. There are so many movies dealing with journalism and war. Actually, these kind of Biography, Drama and History are not my cup of coffee, yet I enjoyed some of them. This movie was a great disappointment to me. It really did not engage the audience.
The star cast was really shining and their performance was satisfactory. Try the film, if you like these kind of movies. Enjoy...!!!
#KiduMovie -
skepticskeptical26 September 2018As a work of cinema, Shock and Awe is pretty mediocre. As far as production values, it seems like a Lifetime channel made-for-tv movie, and I see that it had only a limited release. That said, the film is a quasi-documentary, laying out many of the facts about how the United States was hoodwinked by a few hawks and neocons into the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ignorant Americans really need to watch this as a part of general re-education to avoid yet another repeat of the same mistake (see also: Tonkin Gulf). Shock and Awe also should serve as a sober reminder of why it is absolutely insane to treat a group of war criminals as statesmen--as liberals have recently been doing in praising George W Bush and taking seriously the opinions of men such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair. It is a mystery to me why anyone continues to seek out their opinions about anything. The misery, murder and mayhem caused directly by these people is inexcusable.
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exfiltrator28 August 2021Very educational for those unable to digest a thick book.
Especially for those, like my family members, who consider main stream media to be arbiters of truth. Alas Ed Murrow is longer active.
In the same vein as Spotlight or All the Presidents Men, but not as entertaining. -
This is a very thought provoking film. Its premise as in politicians forging data to suit policies as opposed to making policy to react to data is as relevant to the covid situation as it was to the Iraq war. Replace blackwater and the backhanders to "rebuild" Iraq with pharma and politicians friends who suddenly become PPE manufacturers being awarded million pound contracts and Johnson, hancock, Whittey etc become Bush, Rumsfeld Chaney and Powell... Bush was happy to see 30,000+ Americans die to achieve his aims and the governements of the word today add 15 years inflation to that figure quite happily.
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gideonstube15 July 2018All news services got it wrong except one... Excellent cast, and depiction of the truth about what happened after 911. After 18 years. I also am still waiting for the WMD...Shame.
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Gordon-1129 August 2018This film tells the story of several journalists who defies popular opinion and official viewpoints. They date to question the facts to find the real truth.
It is an engaging story of a seemingly impossible task. I feel empathic towards the journalists' lone fight against the masses. I admire their unwavering persistence. -
fmwongmd31 December 2018Absorbing well told and well acted story with parallels to what is going on today.
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zfives16 July 2018I could only stomach 1/2 of the movie before turning it off. Reiner preached liberal talking points about topics like fake intelligence in today's context and it comes across as extremely contrived and unrealistic. I say this as someone that would love to see all of the neocons held accountable for their actions; this just isn't a good way to dramatize the events. The Post is much more nuanced in its treatment of a similar topic.
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kathleenmcbrair4 April 2020In some ways, this is excellent; however, the opening is garbage. Or perhaps it meant to depict the naivete of war volunteers. It is not easy to be sympathetic to a volunteer who expected a gentle, non-injurious war. The movie would have been far better without this scene. It is anti-heroic, and true heroism does not involve a paycheck or benefits.
The political message is clear in summarizing the falsehoods of Iraq. It harkens to the falsehoods of Viet Nam. When will America hold politicians financially culpable for the costs of fraudulence?
Excellent casting and performances; but a failure to recognize its own weakness in its inability to be wholly honest in all aspects. When we stop glorifying war and veterans, perhaps all of us will examine the motives for using mostly the poor as cannon fodder. -
The film covers an important subject area, one that should serve as a warning for the future. Unfortunately the film felt rushed and flat. They tried so hard to be like the movie Spotlight, but this film came across more as a check list of events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq than a story about investigative journalists. I didn't care for the characters or their journeys because the film didn't give them room to breathe or develop. It was just like "this source says that" in scene after scene. Whereas Spotlight really showed how investigative journalism works, and how the job affected those reporters, Shock and Awe is just like this stuff happened and it's important. It could have been a great movie, but poor execution and unnaturally shoehorned in exposition to educate the audience hinder the drama of the story.