Written and directed by Stuart Townsend, Battle in Seattle reanimates the recent past—namely the late-1999 street actions that, as the largest organized protest of the Clinton era, successfully shut down the World Trade Organization's "Millennium" round of negotiations. While the rest of the developed world quaked in fear of the dreaded Y2K "virus," tens of thousands of costumed demonstrators danced in the streets of downtown Seattle. Billed as the "Battle in Seattle" before it even happened, this was the first Internet protest in history, as someone explains in the movie with reference to the demonstrators' uncanny ability to coordinate blockage of the city's pressure points. For his part, Townsend is rather more labored in orchestrating the ensemble. His protagonists are taken from all sides of the event, including glamorous demonstrators of various persuasions (notably OutKast's André Benjamin), a police officer (Woody Harrelson) and his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron), a feisty TV-news reporter (Connie Nielsen), and Seattle's beleaguered mayor (Ray Liotta). Their intentions, like Townsend's, are mostly good, but Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed to achieve pure tabloid hysteria. In that sense, it's true to the actual event. The impression that the movie leaves is less what the French activist Yves Frémion termed an "orgasm of history" than a hiccup. The world held its breath and moved on. — J. Hoberman
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