John Pilger’s new film Utopia, according to the promotional bumph, ” … tells a universal story of power and resistance in the media age driven by old imperatives and presented as liberalism.“

Utopia has – apart from this predictable rant from Gerard Henderson in The Australian – received positive reviews, both in Australia and internationally.

I’d be happy to write up a review but as I live in Darwin and the nearest screening, according to the list at the film’s website, will be at Yirrkala, 600 kilometres east of here later this week.

Yesterday Kieran Finnane, senior reporter at the on-line Alice Springs News posted a review of Utopia following the screening in Alice Springs last Saturday night.

I’ve extracted a few of the more cogent paragraphs of Kieran’s piece, “Pilger’s polemic fails Australia and Aborigines.”

The film cannot rightly be called ‘documentary’ or ‘journalism’ if those words are still to have any standards attached to them. It does not ask questions, other than ones Pilger thinks he knows the answers to and to which he can lead his interviewee. It does not seek out or fairly treat a single dissenting point of view. It does not recognise complexity. It has all the irksome smugness – and the sing-song voice to boot – of a man in a pulpit who is quite sure of being right.

Aboriginal Australians are represented overwhelmingly as victims, none more so than the residents of the Utopia homelands in the Northern Territory. We see only the worst of their humpies and shelters, and they are allowed to take on representative status, standing in for other remote communities at a time when there has been an unprecedented government effort, however flawed, in remote housing provision. The only Aboriginal resident of Utopia asked to speak is shamelessly led to give the answers Pilger wants.

Kieran is scathing of Pilger’s selection of the white-fellas that support his thesis.

He does pick out a few lone white warriors who see things as he does: one is the reliably concurring academic Jon Altman, who seriously suggests that the problems may be beyond Australia’s capacity to solve; the others are the film’s associate producers, Chris Graham, former editor of the National Indigenous Times whose views still get an airing on Crikey, and Paddy Gibson, a university researcher best known for his anti-Intervention activism.

Indeed, if you have read commentary on the Intervention by Altman and Graham, and media releases by Gibson on behalf of the Intervention Rollback Action Group (IRAG, Alice Springs) and the Stop the Intervention Collective Sydney (STICS), Pilger’s film will have no surprises for you.

He could have written the script on their basis from his home in England and journeyed to Australia merely to get the pictures.

There is a lot more to Kieran’s review. The last line summarises her views about the true value of Pilger’s contribution.

If you are looking for insight and a genuine focus for action, you won’t find it in this dispiriting two hour polemic.

You can read Kieran’s full review here.

I look forward to making up my own mind about Pilger’s Utopia in due course – if they ever arrange a screening within a bull’s roar of Darwin.

If you have seen Utopia and want to share your views please register and post your thoughts here.