In 1999, a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle turned ugly when thousands of protesters showed up in order to make their voices heard. The situation eventually escalated to full scale riots and a state of emergency. Stuart Townsend’s movie Battle in Seattle is an attempt to retell these events in a docudrama style. In my head I’m thinking this could make an amazing film with someone like Paul Greengrass or Michael Winterbottom behind it, but Townsend is a bit of an unknown quantity, being that this is his directorial debut.

What the movie does have is a very impressive cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, Charlize Theron, Joshua Jackson, Channing Tatum, Michelle Rodriguez, and Andre Benjamin. Is this just another case of an actor calling in favours to get a killer cast, similar to Emilio Estevez and his film Bobby? The trailer doesn’t completely sell me, mainly because I think all the recognizable faces work against any sense of realism that the movie might try to create. Still, I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. What do you think? Battle in Seattle has played at a few festivals, but I believe the release date is still TBD.