Space Invader: The Passion of the Zeitgeist
God's children are not for sale, but the movie rights are.
The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
Let me tell you a story: There’s a secret organization that surreptitiously, and hidden from society at large, isolates and frightens children in order to collect from them a precious and lucrative resource. Now, did I just describe the underlying thesis of the QAnon conspiracy theory, or did I just describe the plot of the 2001 Pixar animated film Monsters, Inc.?
One of the most shocking developments of the last several years – and there have been many – is that there are millions of people who’ve come to believe that a group of elites made up of political leaders, business executives and Hollywood celebrities are systemically stealing and abusing children in order to secure a substance called Adrenochrome, which is only produced in children when they’re frightened nearly to death. This scheme is being protected by a secret government apparatus known as the “Deep State”, but a rebel faction inside the military worked to make Donald Trump President of the United States in order to launch a complex plan to bring the conspiracy down in an event called, “The Storm”.
If it sounds like the plot of movie, it’s because you’re not far off. So much of the iconography of QAnon is so deeply routed in pop culture it might as well have come from a spec script sitting on some wannabe screenwriter’s hard drive. The trouble is when the imaginary movie-like secret war of QAnon cross streams with a real-life problem, which is then transposed into his own fictionalized movie.
So let’s talk about Sound of Freedom.
Supposedly, the movie is based on the exploits of Tim Ballard, a former of employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who was so driven by his desire to end human sex trafficking and child exploitation that he launched his own non-profit to tackle the issue as a kind of extra-legal consultancy. Sound of Freedom is essentially the origin story of how and why Bollard started that group, Operation Underground Railroad.
Sound of Freedom was a surprise hit in the summer of 2023, even outperforming surefire franchise hits like Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones. Part of this is owed to its unique “pay-it-forward” model of ticket buying, people could buy tickets for future screenings that other viewers could pick up and use. It’s unknown how many of those bought seats were filled with actual viewers, anecdotal reports went both ways as some people were in empty “sold-out” theatres and others had many real people sitting in chairs with them. Regardless, the strategy worked and helped feed into a mythology: This was a movie that “They” didn’t want you to see.
The “They” are the powerful elites doing the child exploitation. Sound of Freedom completed principal photography in 2018 and had a distribution deal with a 20th Century Fox subsidiary in Latin America before in the was shelved in the aftermath of the merger with the Walt Disney Company. Eventually, the producers bought back the distribution rights, a business matter that happens quite frequently in Hollywood (see the recent case of 2023 festival favourite The Bikeriders), but it feeds into the persecution complex of QAnon true believers.
One of those true believers is none other than the star of Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel. The actor spent most of the press run for the movie sounding like he was reading from a QAnon message board even as the film’s director, Alejandro Monteverde, was doing damage control and trying to distance his film from the movement that had already so enthusiastically attached themselves to it.
Now Caviezel has managed to thrive in Hollywood thanks to lucky breaks (being made the lead of The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick in the editing room over Adrian Brody), being able to survive unlucky breaks (he had to drop out as Cyclops in X-Men because shooting on Frequency ran long), and being able to ride controversy to box office success (playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ). He was the star of a successful TV show when he started his slow decent into being a QAnon brand ambassador (chronicled in a 2021 episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast), and despite the fact that he was the star of one of the biggest films of 2023, his career is stalled.
And Caviezel should really know better having been in Hollywood for 30 years now; his first role in Gus Van Sant’s indie breakthrough My Own Private Idaho. QAnon is part X-Files with its malevolent secret government behind the real government. It’s part Eyes Wide Shut with its plot about secret costumed sex parties in mansions. It employs Adrenochrome, which is a real substance, but whose qualities in the QAnon conspiracy were complete made up by Hunter S. Thompson for the book and film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It contains aspects of Blow Out, The Conversation, Enemy of the State, or any movie about a seeker who accidently stumbles onto a conspiracy and ends up hunted for their efforts to expose it.
The most famous bit of QAnon lore, the phrase “Where We Go One, We Go All”, was lifted wholesale from the 1996 Ridley Scott movie White Squall, and though the line was prominently featured in the trailer, it’s not really an important part of the plot until the hearing scene at the end. Besides, White Squall is a coming-of-age movie about a group of college students doing a semester abroad on a sailing ship when it’s hit by the sever storm that the movie gets its name from. There is no reference in the film to secret cabals, sex trafficking, or anything QAnon adjacent, so what’s the deal?
Part of the answer may be in Cullen Hoback’s excellent six-part documentary Q: Into the Storm, the idea that QAnon started as a kind of goof or performance art like the Cicada 3301 scavenger hunt game or the Luther Blissett Project. That fact the eponymous Q stopped posting on 8kun after the 2020 presidential election, essentially saying “Well, that was fun,” speaks to how little the entire affair mattered to the people leaving little breadcrumbs on the dark corners of the web, and by that point in 2020, more than a few people across the United States had been arrested and charged for violence prompted by their belief in the QAnon conspiracy.
But that’s not the end of the harm done by QAnon, or the appendages that have grown from the phenomenon that now includes Sound of Freedom, despite Monteverde’s own objections. The movie conforms to the QAnon view that the perpetrators of child sex trafficking are well-organized, well-funded, and anonymous.
Sound of Freedom begins with a beautiful woman posing as a talent scout going to a single father of two in Honduras and convincing him to bring his kids to her office for a screen test. When the father drops them off there are a dozen other kids there, laughing and having a good time, but when he goes back that evening the office is empty, all traces of the talent agency have been removed, and all the kids are on a slow cargo ship to who-knows-where.
It's not that different from Taken, the 2008 action movie starring Liam Neeson as a former spy who tears across Paris to find his daughter who was kidnapped by a sophisticated criminal network of Albanian sex traffickers. After working his way up the ladder, the film climaxes with Neeson’s super spy breaking into an auction where the kidnapped girls are being sold to rich perverts. The elites, if you will.
The people who fight real-life sex trafficking, including child trafficking, hate these portrayals. In response to the rising popularity of Sound of Freedom last summer, numerous media outlets sought comment and criticisms about the film with many experts in the field noting that, in real-life, trafficking victims are disproportionally exploited by someone they know and trust as opposed to a stranger who throws them in the back of a van.
“In addition to problematic depictions of child trafficking, it is also troubling how Sound of Freedom glorifies rescue missions, disregarding decades of research and experience showing that international sting operations are dangerous, sometimes illegal, often unethical, and fail to dismantle or discourage human trafficking,” wrote Kristen Abrams, senior director for Combatting Human Trafficking at the McCain Institute, in a USA Today op-ed. “While rescues and raids make for an action-packed movie, they are far from the preferred response to any kind of human trafficking.”
Adding more cause for concern in the immediate aftermath of Sound of Freedom’s release was the news that Ballard, subject of the film, was removed as CEO and forced to leave O.U.R., the organization he created, due to allegations of sexual misconduct. Ballard is accused of pressuring women employed by O.U.R. to pose as his wife while on rescue missions and going as far as suggesting they stay in the same hotel room and have sex in order to sell the role. This was not Ballard’s first brush with alleged rule breaking, government attorneys in Utah investigated O.U.R. for illegal fundraising efforts, and Ballard himself drew over half-a-million dollars in compensation in his last year as CEO. His employment with DHS, the root of Ballard’s self-mythology, has also been hard to verify.
Given all this, I was a little taken aback when last summer our city’s mayor told his thousands of followers that he “really recommended” Sound of Freedom. “It’s a heavy and emotional topic. Trafficking is a $150 billion dollar a year ‘industry’ and that should collectively break our hearts,” Cam Guthrie said. He was quoting a title card at the end of the movie that also says, “there are more people enslaved today than at any other time in history.” It sound preposterous, and while its difficult to get exact numbers, this might actually be true. Having said that, only a small number of enslaved people are the victims of sex trafficking, most are victims of forced marriage and forced labour, which are both symptoms of extreme poverty and thus not solvable by Tim Ballard and his peeps going undercover.
Some people on Twitter took issue for me calling out the mayor for supporting a movie with dubious credentials because it supposedly tackles a serious issue. I would never tell anyone that they shouldn’t watch a movie, even if I don’t like it, but art does occasionally need to exist in context, especially if it’s dramatizing supposedly real events. If you’re watching Sound of Freedom as an issues movie, you’re watching it wrong because of how it feeds into all the wrong impressions about an important issue.
But looking at Sound of Freedom as just another movie, it’s not terrible. Alejandro Monteverde clearly has a sense of style, but he doesn’t have a sense of pacing. The plot follows “Ballard” has he sets up an elaborate Ocean’s 11-style scam in Columbia to entrap wealthy pedophiles and traffickers in order to save the daughter of the aforementioned single father. When the girl isn’t among the recovered children, Ballard literally goes upriver to save her from a warlord by posing as a doctor. You only really need to do one of those two plots to sell the idea. And despite the seriousness, some of this might actually have been fun if Caviezel could demonstrate either humour or charisma instead of looking like a rock cover in blonde moss. At least the screenwriters show themselves capable of camp given that Ballard’s Columbian sidekick, played by character actor Bill Camp, is a former mafioso literally named “Vampiro”.
In different hands, and in a world where QAnon was safely marginalized, one might feel a bit more free to enjoy Sound of Freedom, and its certainly proof that a mid-budget film can still strike a chord if it finds the right audience. But you can’t look at art in a vacuum, can you? Tim Ballard is a bad guy, him and his organization have seriously undermined activism on a serious issue, and the way that the film has approached its subject matter, with the help of the film’s star, have buttressed a seditionist movement that’s radicalized millions of people around the world. At least Monsters Inc. ends with a joke.
Sound of Freedom is available on Amazon Prime Video. Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis is holding a screening on February 22 at 6:30 pm followed by a conversation about depictions of trafficking in pop culture. Get full event details here.
The Bookshelf:
Amélie (Wed)
Anatomy of a Fall (Sat-Sun, Thurs)
Poor Things (Sat-Sun, Tues-Wed)
The Teacher’s Lounge
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
Anyone But You
Argylle
Dune, the 2021 version (Sat-Mon, Wed)
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (Sat, Mon-Wed)
Fighter
Jeff Koons. A Family Portrait (Sun)
Mean Girls (Sat-Tues)
Migration (Sat-Sun)
The Movie Emperor
Peppa’s Cinema Party (Sat-Sun)
Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya
Wonka (Sat-Tues)
Warning 2
Starting Wednesday – Bob Marley: One Love, Madame Web
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
American Fiction (Sat-Tues)
Anyone But You
Argylle
The Beekeeper
Lisa Frankenstein
Mean Girls
Turning Red
Wonka (Sat-Tues)
The Zone of Interest (Sat, Tues)
Starting Wednesday – Bob Marley: One Love, Madame Web
Mustang Drive-In:
Closed for the season.
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
Beans (Mon)
Freud’s Last Session
Origin (Sat-Sun, Wed)
Past Lives (Sun, Wed)
Poor Things
The Teacher’s Lounge
The Zone of Interest
Princess Cinemas – Original:
10 Things I Hate About You (Sat)
Amélie (Wed)
American Fiction (Sat-Sun, Tues-Thurs)
The Braid (Sat-Mon)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Thurs)
Apollo Cinema:
Amélie (Fri)
Anweshippin Kandethum (Sat)
Eagle (Sat, Tues)
Ghost (Wed)
The Iron Claw (Sat)
Lal Salaam (Sun, Thurs)
Lover (Sat, Thurs)
My Bloody Valentine, the 1981 original (Wed)
Thelma and Louise (Tues)
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!