LIONS FOR LAMBS

“I am never afraid of an army of Lions led into battle by a Lamb. I fear more the army of Lambs who have a Lion to lead them”

-Alexander the Great-

I was reluctant to watch this film, since the reviews aren’t as expected. But the hot topic of U.S. politics attracts me. Too bad the Tom Cruise factor gave this film a bad distraction, surely it will draws attention but in the other hand it will also attracts girls who has a serious distate for political movies like this. With three interconnected stories, the one with the senator (Meryl Streep act very impressively here) and A lecturer with his student and two buddies trapped in Afghanistan, the political weigh was enormous since this film was made on ideas, not characters.

This film is a snapshot of 2007; it confines the anger and frustation of some Americans regarding their tiresome war against terrorism. Had someone watch this film 20 years later, it would have a different review. It’s not a simple tale of good and bad, this is a search of which one is good and which one is bad, and this film gives substantial amount to the grey areas.

Tête-à-tête between Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a hawkish Republican Senator with acerbic journalist Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) was appealing, although a bit jaded and sounded like an audio version of New York Times editorial. But the segment with Robert Redford and his student is very interesting, on how Robert say that the ignorant will have to pay the price of their ignorance.

Ignorance among university students, that sounds very familiar to me. As an ex university student myself I found this ignorant phenomena very close. Sure the students are the the one who makes the change in this country but huge amount of them are ignorant of everything in this world, all the care is how to get good grades, nice job and hefty amount of porn downloads plus a new PS3 or XBOX 360, nobody give a fuck about change and stuff these days. Do they read books? Rarely. As a country with 220++ million people, we only publish 15.000 book titles per year.

But they are proudly calling themselves an agent of change. Which agent of change who hails Transformers as the best film of all time?

Sordidly, most students here (in Indonesia) will buy Jasper Irving’s rhetoric instead of Janine’s and huge amount of anti war jargon in this film will not appeal moviegoers in Indonesia since most are unfamiliar with thick Americanism in this film. As far as I know this film only lasted two weeks at the cinemas with few copies, and as expected, less people watch this film, even with subtitles.