Rats (2016)

I write about this movie because it solidifies the point that a documentary being informative means little on its own.  This is a very informative documentary.  I learned about the origins of terriers as a dog breed.  I learned about the danger of parasites when encountering rats.  I learned about the intelligent behavior of rats.  I learned about the Karni Mata Temple in India.  

Worst shit I've ever seen.

Loud horror-movie music and disgusting sound effects play incessantly over scene after scene of dramatic camerawork.  The problem isn't that this is unpleasant, but that it betrays a desperate desire to manipulate you, and it can't even do that because it's too repetitive and obvious.  It succeeds only in annoying you.  Apparently, no more than a single idea ever passed through the head of anyone whose job it was to try to get a rise out of the audience.

The movie despises rats, and I question the perceptiveness of anyone who disagrees.  Some people defend this by saying the information in this movie is true.  But it repeatedly and graphically shows rats being killed.  What is the point of this petty rage against a force of nature?  There are scenes some people think are meant to be more even-handed toward the rats, but if you ask me, it's more accurate to say those scenes are Orientalism.  It shows us people who consume rats in Southeast Asia and introduces the Karni Mata Temple, where people house rats.  But it doesn't stop with the creepy music.  In fact, it blares more loudly in that scene than it does at many other points in the movie.  Do you think that's respectful of those people?

I really can't put it better than Peter Debruge when he says "Any other movie featuring this much animal murder would seem downright inhumane, unless the audience can be convinced to root for their extermination," and that the film is not "fair to the animals in question, who would surely view this as a grisly, “Faces of Death”-style marathon of murder."  Of course, it is not only rats who would view the movie as such, but also those of us humans who don't think nonhuman animals deserve this movie's sadism and yellow journalism. 

But do you expect better from Morgan Spurlock?  His filmmaking is famous for nothing but sensationalism.  It only saw success in his most famous film, Super Size Me.  He got away with it by playing into a hot-button issue and masquerading as opposition to corporate malfeasance.  He makes various claims that he's imitating what "average Americans" do while eating a diet no "average" person eats, and while he doesn't outright lie about his medical history he comes close with the omissions he makes.

Jokers on Letterboxd who like this movie think it shows "both sides" of rats as a species, whatever that means, or that all the information it shares about the harms rats cause to humans is valuable.  What they don't understand is that this movie's detractors don't think its information is untrue, or even that it leaves out "good" information about rats, whatever that would mean.  The problem is that it's repetitive and that it absolutely relishes showing rats being killed.  One of the sillier positive reviews of this movie asks if people would respond so negatively if it were about mosquitoes instead.  My answer is that I would, if the footage consisted of people using tweezers to torment mosquitoes out of spite.  

I'm sure somebody could make an interesting movie about how angry people get toward animal species that cause them harm, despite knowing we can't really hold them responsible, but it would have to be one with a better stylistic game than this, that actually knows how to vary its tone.  Why should I care that Rats is informative when I could get all the factual information it contains elsewhere?  Recognizing that this movie is informative only goes to show that an informative movie can still be an irredeemable piece of shit.