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The Rocket (2013)
Oh, good. Hackneyed poverty porn.
Does this film seriously contain a line of dialogue where a dirty brown person looks at a clean toilet given to him by a well-dressed, clean white man and then make an argument that he'd rather go back to pooping on the dirt?
Yes. Yes, it does.
I understand that white guilt is great for getting award nominations and then winning some of those awards, but The Rocket is the most sickening type of poverty porn film out there. The film goes out of it's way to paint the Lao as underdeveloped savages, while at the same time blaming the loss of their simple, noble life on white people.
The film plays like a 'greatest hits' list of third world oppression, that the directors seems to have pulled from the first page Google results of a search for 'Problems with Laos'. UXO's? Check. Village relocation due to encroaching Australian hydro-power projects? Check. Corrupt government officials ruling the peasants through bribery and strong-arm violence? Check.
The problem is, while these are probably real problems in Laos, the film's need to hit every point on the list during it's 90 minute runtime only serves to trivialize the reality of what's probably happening in Laos. It's hard to believe that one little boy would have his life uprooted by an infrastructure development, only to be blown up several times by old bombs. In the end, the entire film feels like the director just wants you to CARE SO MUCH about all the problems that the Western world has brought to these poor brown, ground poopers... But he jumps from subject to subject so quickly that he glosses over any sort of complexity that might help any audience member to actually have anything less than the superficial understanding the director things will make a tear come to your eye.
He's found the heartstrings, and he just haphazardly plucks away. It's almost like after running that first Google search for 'Problems with Laos', Mordaunt Googled, 'How to manipulate festival judges into awarding your film prizes by exploiting poor people.' Hopefully, Mordaunt will make The Rocket 2, and he can film a Lao child covered in flies.