Secrecy

It had been a while since I had the time to sit down and actually watch a movie, so this whether it was good or bad wouldn't really have mattered, just the act of viewing a movie would have been enough to make me a little happier. Even more on the plus side, it was very good.

This documentary takes a pretty simple stance, America has become a very security and secret orientated government, people on all sides of the issue agree on that. Now the question is as follows, is that a good or bad thing? It's good when we have the technology to listen to Osama Bin Laden's satellite phone calls, which that secret was leaked by a news paper and low and behold he stopped making phone calls with it. There's an example where secrecy was a good thing. A place where its not good would be Guantanamo Bay, or the secret prisons we have set up in other countries.

The documentary is smart, it doesn't try and judge what is right and wrong but simply lets the players tell their side of the story. We go from the conception of the Nuclear bomb through the events of 9-11 and the WMD's. A really cool, and sort of scary bit of information was this, when they made the A-bomb they had to keep it secret for five reasons and they are as follows: The Germans, The Japanese, The Russians, All other countries, and last but not least, the American people! The had to keep it secret from us, and congress, most of the rest of the government didn't even know about it. Since its inception was against the law at the time it had to be withheld from the public's knowledge and the other parts of government.

The documentary was very well made, it had parts that reminded me of another great doc. called "The Corporation" It had music that sounded like Phillip Glass from "The Fog of War" It had these little animated sections that tied the movie together, they were black and white and sort of morphed and changed depicting things that the doc. was talking about, it really added to it.

I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to anyone who considers themselves an American, it deals with the core principles this country is based on. If a democracy is of the people, then how can we have people in the government deciding what to keep secret from us about our own country? A tough question. 8/10 stars.

Directors: Peter Galison, Robb Moss