Puppet movie.
The puppet movie Team America is a mixed bag. (*) It’s as filled with profanity as the South Park movie, but it wasn’t as thoroughly funny. It tries to make a number of points of social importance, but only makes a few.
Its most important point is the film’s very existence. It is the first post–9/11 major Hollywood film on the subject of the Global War on Terrorism. It avoids any deeper question on the nature of the war by switching focus to an imaginary scenario that places the root of all evil with (spoilers) a certain nuclear-obsessed Asian dictator.
The film properly had serious moments as it focused on the victims of terrorism and oppression, but ultimately the filmmakers took great pains to remain politically correct. The message is that Islamic terrorism is not itself a great danger. The real danger is something else entirely.
The voice acting was poor. The self-referential jokes about the movie that features puppets instead of human actors grew old quickly. The joking about coerced homosexual sex was unfunny and a low point.
The bright notes were first the brilliant execution of the marionettes and the sets; second the usually funny lampooning of antiwar celebrities; and third the simple boldness in making a movie that features Arab Muslim characters engaged in anti-Western terrorism.
I would go to another puppet movie, but what I hope this movie really pioneers is the simple task of making a movie about Islamist terrorism and the fight against it.
Update: The strange similarity just occurred to me of the plots of Team America and that masterwork of cinematic trainwrecks, 2001: A Space Travesty (†)