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Battle in Seattle

EMAILPRINTRedwood Palms Pictures

Battle in Seattle reviews
54
7.6 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 17 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 3 votes
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Action  |  Drama

Written by: Stuart Townsend

Directed by: Stuart Townsend

Release Date:
Theatrical: September 19, 2008
DVD: March 10, 2009

Running Time: 100 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: R for language and some violence

Starring Isaach De Bankole, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, Andre Benjamin, Connie Nielsen, and Joshua Jackson

Django, Sam, Lou and Jay are united in their desire to be heard and to make a difference, for these protesters, this is very personal and the stakes are higher than mere politics. A peaceful demonstration to stop the WTO talks quickly escalates into a full-scale riot and an eventual State of Emergency results. The streets are mayhem, the WTO is paralyzed. Caught in the crossfire are Seattle residents, including its beleaguered mayor, a riot cop on the streets and his pregnant wife. The choices they make will change their lives forever and prove, ultimately, that ordinary people can change the world. (Redwood Palms Pictures)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

91

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."

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75

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.

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75

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.

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75

TV Guide Ken Fox

What the film lacks in artistry it makes up for in commitment.

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70

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

While it makes no bones about where its sympathies lie, these fictional stories show a genuine fascination with the role politics plays on both sides of such confrontations and how things can spin out of control with no single person to blame.

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70

Chicago Reader Joshua Katzman

Absorbing docudrama.

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67

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

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60

Variety Dennis Harvey

Picture's ambition, cogency and decent performances make up for its uneven aspects. Woody Harrelson has some especially good moments as a cop.

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50

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.

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50

The New York Times Stephen Holden

A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.

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50

New York Post Lou Lumenick

In his directing debut Battle in Seattle, actor Stuart Towns end does an impressive job (on a shoestring budget) of re-creating the massive street protests that forced the cancellation of the World Trade Organization summit in 1999.

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50

San Francisco Chronicle Reyhan Harmanci

Getting an inside view on events is fascinating enough to carry the movie.

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50

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

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50

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Near the end of the movie, Django jokes that, after the protests, people may still not know what the WTO is, but "they know it's bad." That's a fair summation of how much insight Battle in Seattle provides for its viewers.

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50

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Townsend's sincerity, his admiration for the idealism of the people behind the anti-WTO protests, is never in doubt, but combining drama with historical re-creation is frankly a challenge his filmmaking skills are not up to.

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30

Washington Post John Anderson

It's a movie by a true believer in anti-globalization, and it may win a few converts, but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.

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20

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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