Illusion and Reality

P2P software has brought our home "entertainment" to a whole new level, exe file is sent by a friend from the other end of the planet, and there you are flicking from 'Eastenders' to ..... and this evening I stumbled on a film from 2007 called "the Kingdom". "The Kingdom" opens up with wahhabi terrorists breaking into a western compound in Riyadh, running amok, detonating bombs, killing all and sundry, men, women and children. Then you stop and think, chew the cud and it dawns in you that westerners being killed by muslims is hardly par for the course. In fact, despite the WRC, despite Madrid and despite London, and a little bit of research on those incidents would not be out of place, I cannot remember seeing bodies of little caucasian kids and their mums and dads strewn throughout Hicksville or some Devonshire village.

One really wonders what films like this are about and one user on writing a review in 'The Internet Movie Database' appropriately writes; "The problem is that it doesn't really know whether it primarily wants to be an action movie or a political comment." Oh, is this some sort of modern day "Animal Farm" I am about to watch here or is it another "bull in a china shop" Hollywood attempt to try to subvert my mind? Yes, an attempt to subvert my mind, perhaps, and I find myself putting on my thinking cap before taking it back off and consuming the modern day "soma". This has to be seen as an action movie in the same vein as such other great Hollywood "classics" as Sylvain White's 'True Lies' or Ed Zwick's 'The Siege'.

The reality is, of course, quite different; it is not little western kids who are being blown to smithereens in small town America or village England. No, if we are looking for mutilated innocent men, women and children we might want to look to the towns and villages of  Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and the Lebanon. This is the reality and, while the less short-sighted of us can put on our thinking caps, take them back off again, and switch off when we are consuming the Hollywood drug, a general acceptance, or at least, the turning of a blind eye, to this reality is facilitated among the myopic majority in Hicksville and Devonshire.