Where To Invade Next review: An entertaining, more light-hearted documentary finely targeted to the United States.
Where To Invade Next review by Paul Heath, Berlin Film Festival, 2016. Where To Invade Next is the latest documentary from celebrated, and indeed Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who previously brought us the likes of Bowling For Columbine (for which he won the Academy Award), the controversial Fahrenheit 9/11, and most recently Capitalism: A Love Story.
Here, Moore presents his most lighthearted a piece which sees him travel around the world essentially looking for things that the world does better than America. For example, the French are better cooks, so they provide better school dinners; the Italians have more holidays per year, and make more love, so they live longer; the Germans work even less hours, and get free spa breaks, paid for by their government if they are stressed out, so they are happier, etc, etc. Moore travels to all of these countries and more, including Tunisia, Finland, Norway, Iceland, ‘invading’ each one and taking the stuff they do better back to the United States Of America.
As with all of Michael Moore’s documentaries, everything is put together really, really well, it is cleverly editing and it is laugh-out-loud funny all of the way through. Most of the time we’re laughing with him in disbelief at the Europeans who do things completely different to the U.S.; like the Finnish school kids who have no homework, study for less hours, have no private schools and have the best results for their education in the world. Or the French, who may have a cheese course with every meal, but provide four to five different courses for their children daily, all individually cultivated to give them the best nutrition possible – and it costs less than the garbage served to American kids. Then there’s the Slovenians who don’t charge for their college education, so their students don’t have any debt. They even allow in foreign students, including those from the United States, to study for free with no questions asked, and they get a better education at the end of it all. You get the picture.
Moore’s documentary is entertaining all of the way through, and while not as hard-hitting as some of his previous movies, it does raise many questions as he continues on his journey across mainland Europe questioning, though always respecting their methods. Moore’s documentary almost raises too many questions as it’s hard to really digest each one before the next one is thrust upon you. Moore constantly looks down on his own nation’s methods; showcase shocking stats on how his country spends its tax dollars, compared to the countries he visits. He reminds us that America has one of the worse crime rates in the world, and still has capital punishment in some of its States. He compares this to Norway where their maximum sentence for anyone committing a crime is just 21 years. If the rest of the documentary is unbalanced, it isn’t here as Moore seeks out the father of one of the victims of the infamous summer-camp shootings from 2011, where Anders Behring Breivik went on a killing spree where 54 people, mostly children were murdered in cold blood. Breivik got just 21 years in prison for the crime and Moore indirectly asks the question; is this right? They still have the a lower crime rate that the United States.
Sitting watching this in the heart of Europe is probably a completely different experience to watching the film with its intended audience; people of the United States, and as a result it is less impactful. That said, the film does have you sat there thinking; why don’t we do that, or we do that, or we should do that. It’s question raising. It is very much targeted at the people of its domestic territories, but above all, it’s very entertaining.
Where To Invade Next review by Paul Heath at the Berlin Film Festival, 2016.
