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This product from Michael Moore (Dir) is a documentary of the Bush Administration's decision behind the 911 investigation and the Iraqi war in 2002. The theme of the movie falls into the deliberative branch of rhetoric, featuring a future temporal focus under the objective of exhorting or dissuading the audience from certain political choice. It is rhetoric on casting a negative vote on Bush and his close comrades in the administration by intensifying their bad and omitting their good under inductive reasoning (from particular to general - from Bush's several particular decisions to his general ideology).

The film, mostly making use of news footage, is divided into 3 main parts: (1) the long (15 minutes) pre-credits sequence of peccadilloes on Bush's personality (which then forms the basis of the criticism on Bush); (2) the revelation of the commercial relations between Bush's family and Osama Bin Laden's family; and (3) the ramifications of the US's waging the war on Iraq. The pre-credit sequence is very powerful in depicting Bush's inertia, inability and indecisiveness. The entire film serves a single purpose of obliterating Bush's wisdom in deciding to free Laden's family from the US territory and his vanity in asserting Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Moore positions himself as a rapt onlooker of Bush by becoming a narrator of the film, rendering a very high degree of subjectivity. Nevertheless, Moore dilutes it by making use of 3 key tactics of (1) adopting evidence and logic (logos); (2) building credibility (ethos); and (3) arousing sympathy (pathos) in rhetoric to persuade the viewer to believe in what he raises and to take side with him. All these 3 rhetorical devices are meant to reinforce Moore's argument on the ostentatious movements of Bush and his administration in the 2 events. In particular, sharp immediate contrasts of visual and documentary evidence (logos) are used to rattle the claims of the Bush Administration in the 9/11 tragedy and in their decision to attack Iraq. This technique is combined with the frequent use of probing questions as a lead-in to draw the attention of the spectator to the critical evidence. The first half of the film witnesses Moore's uses of figures and rationality to vindicate his criticisms on Bush and the second half resorts to the persuasive strategy of arousing the sympathy of the audience in admitting the negative consequences of the Iraqi war. Moore further enhances the degree of credibility, trustworthiness and reality (ethos) by interviewing some soldiers on several war locales, a victim's family, some media experts/opinion leaders and Congressmen.

The whole film, especially the fist half, is too informative to digest. Moore establishes humours at certain interval to enrich the readability of the film and occasionally uses convoluted wordings to connote an opposite meaning to the viewer.

Moore skilfully applies the concept of the enthymeme in supplying the major premise (i.e., Bush's family has commercial interests with Laden's family and the war on Iraq is economically based) and the minor premise (i.e., Bush lets Laden's family go after 9/11 and he knows that Iraq has no weapon of mass destruction) in syllogism to lead the audience to make the conclusion that Bush is not reliable and not to be trusted. The film abundant in persuasive strategies is a good masterpiece in the art of rhetoric.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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