Vantage Point

I caught the movie Vantage Point on DVD last night. A few thoughts:

1. I'm pretty sure that the U.S. president has never used a body double, certainly no where near the media. If William Hurt hadn't played both the President and his double, the fact would have been obvious in the GNN control room.

2. The Secret Service is shown searching for the "sniper" in the Plaza Major, and rushing to the aid of their injured colleagues. As honorable and courageous as this might be, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen in real life. In real life, they would be surrounding the president, and leave the rest to local law enforcement.

3. The probability that every body who was anybody in the film would all accidently show up under the same underpass was so remote as to be laughable.

4. The opening sequence where Sigourney Weaver chews out a reporter for "editorializing" on air was not believable. The editorial in question -- that some people don't like us, was exactly what the media would take the trouble to report. I can't make the judgment as to whether the president's anti-terror summit should be the "real" story as Weaver claims, but for the American media, the anti-American demonstration is always the story. Even I can't remember the point of the G8 meeting in Seattle, but we all remember the demonstrators.

5. The filmmakers are cowards. They set out to make a straightforward movie about the struggle against terrorism, but rob this struggle of any context. Who are the terrorists? Why do they hate America? What are they trying to accomplish by kidnapping the president? All these questions aren't even asked in this movie, let alone answered. The only conceivable reason for this is that the filmmakers didn't want to name names.