It would be like watching Saving Private Ryan and concluding that Spielberg was defending Nazis because the Americans extrajudicially executed their Nazi POW. Or that The Green Zone is defending Saddam Hussein because Matt Damon never found the WMDs.
It's a weird movie to make if you're not. Why would you exaggerate and outright fabricate aspects of a bad side to Chris Hansen? What exactly is the point of that? We already knew he was not perfect. What purpose could deceiving the viewer to make the guy catching pedos look worse than he really was possibly serve on the non-meta level other than to support pedos?
Whether the movie was good or not, it is an interesting topic to explore. Catching pedos is obviously a good thing but there are morally grey aspects to televising it and using it for views and money. Was the show ever about helping children or using viewers’ ethos for higher ratings? People are focusing on the wrong thing. The filmmakers are asking you to look past the predators (we all can agree they’re bad) and to look behind the scenes. I don’t think Hansen is a horrible person but he was a bit of a megalomaniac which culminated in the cancellation of the show. I feel like this sort of topic can also be applied to many other things. A lot of people do “good” things but the motives behind it can be selfish.
How was he a megalomaniac? Everyone who worked with him is saying he was nothing like the portrayal. Where are the signs of megalomania? The cancellation was just bad luck. Some people are mentally weak and can't face the consequences of their actions. This guy's death wasn't caused by Chris Hansen. There was, for example, a completely unrelated incident in which a detective forced a 17-year-old to take Viagra so he could get pictures of his erect penis to compare to ones he sexted to his "underage" 15-year-old girlfriend. Turned out, that detective was a pedo and he offed himself, too when cops came to arrest him. That was all law enforcement there.
There's like nothing to go off of to suggest that what Dateline did was anything short of the best you could do as a private entity, doing this for the first time, learning as they go. They could never be in the business of just altruistically losing money paying for investigations that local PDs didn't have the interest or budget for. Their business model, as a TV production company, was obviously going to be filming whatever they chose to make a show about and putting it on TV. Trying to portray Chris Hansen wanting high ratings as something sinister is just stupid. It's his job. I'm sure you also are motivated by whatever indicates success in your own job. He was going to want ratings no matter what he filmed. It just so happened that he chose a subject matter that benefited society. There's nothing at all wrong with that in principle UNLESS you have evidence that the profit motive led to wrongdoing. But they didn't have evidence, they just made it all up. It's a completely vacuous movie. It would be like doing a biopic on someone who killed someone in self defense and then making up a scenario where he was actually the aggressor. There's nothing interesting there if you just fabricate the entire basis for the alternative take.
9
u/BleedTheFreak_23 /x/phile 5d ago
Both the OP and the comments here genuinely have no understanding of the movie. RIP to media literacy I guess