Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

I’m not a fortune teller. I don’t have a five-year plan. I can’t tell you what I’ll eat for dinner tonight, let alone anything I’ll be doing in two years’ time.  But I can tell you right now with a very strong degree of confidence I will not be paying $21 to go to They Are Us, the film that apparently focuses on Jacinda Ardern’s response to the Christchurch massacre.    I have nothing personal against the filmmaker. Andrew Niccol has actually written or directed two of my all-time favourite films. I think The Truman Show is genius. I love Gattaca.  They Are Us, on the other hand, makes me squirm.  It’s not that I’m fundamentally opposed to a film about the events in Christchurch. I actually saw it as an inevitability. After all, we have a film about Aramoana. There’s a Hollywood film about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway.  But if the production of this film had actually considered the meaning behind its title, They Are Us, we wouldn’t have seen so many people affected by the massacre respond in disgust.