"The whole world is watching!"

-Anti-WTO protestors

Well, not quite. Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle, about the protests at the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference, grossed well under $1 million at the box office when it was released in a handful of theaters last fall. The DVD came out on March 10. I usually have trouble getting new releases on Netflix because the wait list is so long, but I had so such problem when I Netflixed Battle in Seattle. Interest in this movie seems to range from lukewarm to nil.

That's too bad, because this is a terrific movie. The large, big-name cast is uniformly stellar, and the issues are presented in an impassioned, easy-to-absorb way. If you want to find out what the hell the World Trade Organization is, or if you just want to be entertained, then this is the movie for you.

It's told from the point of view of the activists, cops, officials and reporters who were caught up in momentous events that lasted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Townsend puts the protestors front and center and unapologetically sides with most of their positions. He uses riveting documentary footage à la Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, a groundbreaking film about the 1968 Democratic National Convention. We see police spraying pepper spray into the eyes of clearly nonviolent protestors. The protests (labeled "riots" by the media) did eventually turn violent. We see anarchists breaking windows and shutting down commercial enterprise in the downtown area. They're portrayed as self-righteous thugs in the movie, but these anarchists, many of them from Eugene, Oregon and members of eco-radical groups like the Earth Liberation Front, were not without a sense of humor. They made a list of targets, which included Planet Hollywood "for being Planet Hollywood."

As long as it's covering the nuts-and-bolts of the protestors' tactics and the police crackdown, Battle in Seattle is a first-rate docudrama. Where it gets a little bogged down is in the scenes dealing with the fictional characters and the melodramatic situations that Townsend has come up with. Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Henderson play activists falling in love; Woody Harrelson and Charlize Theron play a couple who lose their unborn child to police brutality; Connie Nielsen plays a reporter who ends up joining the protests; and so on. Luckily, all of these actors stay in the moment and create sympathetic characters, as does André Benjamin (aka André 3000), who probably delivers the best performance in the movie.

Townsend has clearly done his homework and includes some shocking statistics. During the end credits, he makes a credible connection between the WTO's policies, which are criticized worldwide for favoring the rich and powerful, and the suicides of more than 40,000 farmers in India that have taken place over the last decade. Whatever its flaws, Battle in Seattle is an important social document and an absolute must-see.