If you enjoy being smothered to death with a pillow, then Traitor is the movie for you. Ostensibly a thriller about an American Muslim who has gone deep undercover into an Islamic terrorist cell, it turns into a case study for the failure of good intentions.

 

The film follows Samir (Don Cheadle), a vagabond arms dealer/bomb maker from a Yemeni prison to the heart of a conspiracy to bomb the United States. Cheadle speaks in a tortured whisper and has a mortally wounded sense of morality, which can only mean he’s a double-agent. He is a deep, deep undercover operative – so deep that only his handler Jeff Daniels (still sporting his haircut from Dumb & Dumber), knows that Samir is really fighting for the good guys. Hot on his trail is the pointy-jawed Guy Pearce, an upright FBI super-agent who is slightly less complex than Dudley Do-Right.

 

Everybody whispers and looks anguished all the time except the terrorists, who sip fine champagne and elude the police in stylish trenchcoats and cowl-necked sweaters. Nobody seems to be enjoying themselves here – there is neither the grim satisfaction in victory or the crushing defeat of failure.

 

Traitor is far less than the sum of its parts. The production is full of reasonably talented people, all putting forth their best effort, and the film’s failure to be even remotely interesting is puzzling. Is it the sub-par music? The dialogue that is less interesting than the average Law & Order? Or is it the pedestrian direction, that labors so hard to be interesting, but winds up feeling like a claustrophobic movie-of-the-week?

 

Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff has crafted a film that feels like an overly serious child begging for a place at the adult’s table. Instead of bravely plunging into the issues at hand, Nachmanoff plays dress-up with the war on terror, stridently trying to imitate a serious discussion by making everything as stern and as somber as possible.

 

Don Cheadle can’t dampen his screen, so he settles for whispering and looking sorrowful all the time. Guy Pierce does his best Donnie Wahlberg impersonation as a dedicated FBI agent hot on Samir’s trail. Everybody is eloquent and convincing, and utterly dull at the same time. The film’s lone daring stroke of imagination is hammered into submission with fractured and rhythmless direction.

 

The bottom line here is that the quagmire of terrorism and modern warfare just aren’t ready for cinematic treatment yet. There hasn’t been a commercially successful project about the Iraq war, or the concurrent war on terrorism. The list of failures is long and include many illustrious filmmakers:

 

In The Valley Of Elah

Stop-Loss

Standard Operating Procedure

Redacted

Rendition

Vantage Point

The Kingdom

Lions For Lambs

Grace Is Gone

 

None of them are good; almost all of them are awful. Only Errol Morris’ intricately researched Standard Operating Procedure and Vantage Point’s goofy, pretend heroics offered any experience that resembled ‘entertainment’.

 

There’s a good reason that we haven’t seen a good film about the modern war on terrorism – we’re mired too deeply in it. We’re in the proverbial ‘fog of war’, fighting a stateless enemy and our own discontent with the political process. History can’t be appreciated while it is still being written; and morally provocative tales can’t be told until there is a collective judgement on the outcome.

 

It took six years after the Vietnam war ended for the first truly powerful film to be made about the experience – 1978’s The Deer Hunter. It took another year for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to dramatize the deep moral contradictions that disturbed the country during the war itself. Cinema as an art is a reflective, post-morteming process. Making films about the war on terror is like building a sand castle while the tide is rolling in. Halfway through the process, the foundation is already washed away.

 

Sometime in 2011, we’ll get the first searing, definitive cinematic depiction of the current war in Iraq. The ensuing years will bring films that will start to effectively plumb the depths of the moral quagmire that we’re currently stuck in. By that time, Traitor will be washed out to sea and long forgotten.

 

 

Whether this re-make disappeared off the radar because of changing audience tastes, or because it was supremely witless and inept, we’ll never know. Either way, audiences are lucky that this dreadful mis-fire will soon be buried in DVD remainder bins. Summarizing the plot holes and Knight Rider-level cliches would be tiresome. The only point of interest in this dreadfully tedious affair is as a measuring stick, a point of reference for how far science fiction has regressed.

Originally a novel by Michael Crichton, and filmed for the first time in 1971, the story is about a team of scientists who race to find a cure for a mysterious pathogen that crashed to Earth. The original film is a worthwhile piece of work. On the surface, it’s awkward and dated. The main laboratory set is a late 60’s version of cutting-edge modernity. It’s bright and clean, Kubrick-influenced sterility. The scientists are square-jawed and non-descript, blank cogs with little more than dot-matrix printers at their disposal.

Now, in the post-Matrix world, science has to be dimly lit with green fluorescent bulbs. Labs are built like submarines, and scientists stare at automated beakers controlled by hyperintelligent computers. The scientists are all attractive automatons, differentiated only by a daytime television cliche.

The re-make re-invents almost nothing from the original novel. Since the scientists actually do very little science, the script pads out the running time with plenty of pseudo-science, giving every actor a chance to graft on some ludicrous exposition without actually explaining a thing. One of the most curious deletions in the re-make is the entry procedure into the high tech lab.

In the book, and in the 1971 version, entering the lab was a lengthy, multi-day process of decontamination. The scientists were symbolically purified from the outside in, stripping away layer after layer of contaminants until they reached the most medically pure state Crichton’s science could conceive of at the time.

It’s a fascinating sequence, especially in the novel, where the reader is confronted with a long inventory of potentially hazardous organisms that cover your body from hair to toenails. “We’ve faced up to quite a planning problem here. How to disinfect the human body — one of the dirtiest things in the known universe — without killing the person at the same time,” Crichton writes.

The 2008 version dispenses with such poetry – preferring instead a hybrid montage of showering shots that fetishize water droplets, feet, and shampoo suds. And that, in a nutshell, is a metaphor for the complete failure of the modernized re-make.

The 1971 version of The Andromeda Strain still holds together. It’s a tight, claustrophobic story that draws tension from paranoia and a fear of the unknown. The 2008 re-make drowns out tension in an avalanche of memes, desperately reaching out for relevance and ironically, finding relevance only as a yardstick of failure.

Forty years from now we’ll be laughing at the current design concepts that ‘high-tech’ means inefficient lighting and space station architecture. And hopefully the next people who remake The Andromeda Strain understand that story is more than just randomly running your mouth, and that newer does not mean better when it comes to science.