The Kingdom - what is the point? or War, Oil, and Terrorists

The other night we watched the movie The Kingdom with Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper as FBI agents who go to Saudia Arabia to find a terrorist who has just blown up a lot of people, many American families among them. Even though it is fiction, the situation is a common one nowadays - mass murder in the name of a religion that has been perverted and co-opted for political means. From the moment the agents set foot into Saudi Arabia the atmosphere is one of tension and fear. We see the terrorists spying on the agents as they go through the rubble trying to decipher how it happened and trying to find out who was behind the devastation. The agents are guarded by the Saudi police under the auspices of the Saudi king, but we feel that this protection cannot hold back the terrorists who are planning another mass murder with the FBI agents as the central victims. The Saudi police colonel who is assigned to protect and assist the agents is played by Ashraf Barhom, a newcomer to me, but a fine actor. I totally believed the difficult position he is in as he is threatened by one of his people for helping the Americans, the fear he has for his family, the distrust he has for the Americans. At first I was unsure whether he was going to help them or hinder them as was Jamie Foxx's character, the lead agent. The tension mounts throughout the film as the terrorists build their new bombs, packed with nails and marbles and the agents slowly piece together the knowledge they need to catch the terrorists. Shooting, car crashes, explosions, and treachery occur, but the Americans and the Saudi colonel learn to trust each other and even to like each other. To see this happen was encouraging; it made me think that it could happen in real life for all of us.
But the point of the film, for me, came at the very end. In the beginning, before the agents left for Saudi Arabia, just after they learn their close friend had been killed in the blast, Jamie whispers something to Jennifer Garner who is clearly quite upset. He is asked what he said in the plane trip to Saudi Arabia, but he won't answer. Near end of the movie as the elderly Saudi who was behind the attacks is dying as his young granddaughter looks on, he whispers to her something we cannot hear. Later, we shift to the Americans going home and Foxx finally tells what he whispered. He says, "I said, 'Don't worry. We will kill them all.'" The scene shifts to the apartment of the terrorist and his family and the mother asks the little girl what her grandfather said. This beautiful little innocent replies, "He said, 'Don't worry, we will kill them all.'" To me, this was the point of the whole movie. To me it is obvious that we cannot kill them all - more generations of terrorists will stand up and fight as others fall. Likewise, more Americans will stand and fight. Trying to wipe each other out is as futile an endeavor as stomping on a giant ant hill to eradicate the ants. Futile, absurd, stupid. Impossible.
So my take-away from this movie is probably not what Hollywood intended. After all, they went to a lot of trouble to make a suspenseful, action-packed, thought-provoking movie, but did the director want me to conclude that fighting terrorists never ends? Don't think so, but that message assaulted me with the force of truth. So maybe it is the point. At least it is my point and I'm sticking with it.

Here is a poem by Carl Sandburg that you may not have seen before.

Killers

I am singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:

Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
and killing.

I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.

I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of killing.
Sixteen million men.

Carl Sandburg

And a quote:
We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~Jello Biafra, quoted in The Guardian, 3 November 2007