Battle in Seattle Critic Reviews

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

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.Read the full review

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

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.Read the full review

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

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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

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