The other evening I took my wife to the movies to see Sound of Freedom, a film about which I had heard considerable praise. When we arrived at the theater, however, we were told that the feature was sold out, no seats were available in the SOF auditorium, so we watched Mission Impossible instead.
The Tom Cruise movie was enjoyable, but I was surprised, given the advertising hype I'd seen for it, that only a handful of viewers were scattered throughout the theater.
Later that night I went online to order tickets for an afternoon showing of SOF a couple of days later, and we were able to get seats to see it then.
The film has been very successful, taking in $85 million after two weeks, so how has it happened that theaters are packed to see a film for which there's been relatively little advertising and what publicity there has been is mostly word-of-mouth?
One reason is that the story - the rescue by an American immigration agent of two siblings who had been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery to pedophiles - is based on true events, well-told and very compelling.
Another reason, perhaps, is that the film eschews all of the PC claptrap with which larger production studios feel impelled to lard their films.
Nevertheless, despite the very important message of the movie - that child sex trafficking is a global epidemic to which the U.S. is not immune - the left is not pleased with it.
Their displeasure may be because the hero (played by Jim Caviezel) is a white, vaguely Christian, male, and a lot of the evil characters in the movie happen to be "People of Color," but the ostensible reason is that the film, dealing as it does with an issue prominently opposed by the right-wing QAnon folks, is alleged therefore to be "QAnon-Adjacent" and thus discreditable.
This is such a ridiculous criticism of the movie that it scarcely seems necessary to respond to it. It's like arguing that because humans are bipeds and brontosauruses were bipeds that therefore brontosauruses are "human-adjacent."
Anyway, if you'd like to see a good story go see Sound of Freedom, although due to the subject matter I wouldn't recommend it for children under 16.
Incidentally, watching SOF I couldn't help but see the parallels with my 2015 novel Bridging the Abyss (see the radio button at the top of this page). I wonder if the people who made SOF had read BTF.
Just kidding. Here's the trailer:
