Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times

While it's inarguable that MIT Linguistics professor and reigning American intellectual Noam Chomsky is one of the intelligentsia's most eloquent and spellbinding pragmatists, you wouldn't know it from this dull and meandering documentary. Originally produced for Japanese television (and still sporting that arena's intertitles), Power and Terror strings together a haphazard collection of Chomsky's speaking engagements in which the speaker tackles everything from the political chaos arising post 9/11 to globalization, the West's role in the misleadingly named war on terrorism (Chomsky urges the phrase be placed in quotation marks at all times since it's clearly such a misnomer), and the various terroristic actions and myriad human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.S. over the decades. There's also a rambling discourse on the ongoing Israeli and Palestinian flare-up, suicide bombers, Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and America's new best friend in the region -- Turkey -- and that country's every-bit-as-vile-as-Hussein's treatment of its indigenous Kurdish population. In short, it's standard Chomsky, which translates to clear and levelheaded logic in the face of overwhelming global hypocrisy (chiefly that of the U.S.). Reviled by the right for his undeniable and unassailable logic, feted by the left for the same, Chomsky, at 73, comes off as everyone's wisest grandfather; a gentle strain of sarcasm and humor is present at all times, and clearly he recognizes the loaded proposition of dissent in the current, supercharged political climate. Unfortunately, Junkerman's documentary is infused with all the lusty excitement of a wet sock. Thanks to some truly inane editing (the film inexplicably jumps from speaking engagement to speaking engagement and from topic to topic with virtually no rhyme or reason), the whole affair seems tailor-made for people to doze off to. It's not that Chomsky himself isn't electrifying -- frequently he is -- but that the filmmaker's witless arrangement of the various segments is scattershot and unfocused (something Chomsky himself never is). Bookended by a pair of bizarrely inappropriate Japanese-language folk/pop songs (one of which has the recurring chorus “Oh yeah, give it to me”) and some pointless sequences of Chomsky being mobbed by autograph seekers and wearying fan-types, this is hardly the introduction to the great man's work that Junkerman perhaps hoped it would be. Chomsky and his arguments are brilliant stuff, but this film is just a boring, trite mess.