Hacker Cinema
Sound of Freedom
2023 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Alejandro Monteverde
The story of Tim Ballard, a former US government agent, who quits his job in order to devote his life to rescuing children from global sex traffickers.
2 positive4 negative7 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
>Top Gun: Maverick and Taylor Sheridan’s nostalgic, libertarian-inflected Yellowstone. And a longstanding Christian culture industry has backed projects like the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, a dramatization of child trafficking that grossed more than $242 million for Provo’s Angel Studios. The Christian drama The Forge earned $30 million on a $6 million budget last year.
There’s good evidence that this is an untapped market which normal studios are too afraid to tap.
I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. If you listen to people on the right they have felt unrepresented in popular entertainment for a long time, and these successes are evidence that they are willing to pay for entertainment which aligns with their values.
I walked to the gas station with my dog and two kids, and had a guy yell at me that my kids were going to get kidnapped while I went inside for 5 minutes to buy us some waters and snacks. The biggest hurdle for us letting our children be free range and able to do things on their own has definitely been paranoid parents and busybodies who watched Sound of Freedom and think that every girl is going to immediately get sex trafficked to Guatemalan drug lords (or whatever, I didn't watch the movie) if she leaves her parent's sight for a second.
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Yup, Sound of Freedom was pushed very heavily by rightwing media.
There were daily articles on news sites like Breitbart about how it was the best movie of the year and how biased critics were trying to destroy it. About how readers should watch it to help support a conservative alternative to Hollywood.
I find in the last decade or so, movies with a big disparity between Audience/Critics are often that way because of culture war silliness unrelated to the content of the actual film.
See -
Sound of Freedom (2023) - 60% Tomoatometer - 99% Audience Score
It is also bad for the fabric of society at large, in the sense that if we don't clearly take a stand against abhorrent behaviour then we are in some sense condoning it. Does the tech industry have any alternate solutions that could functionally mitigate this abuse?
I'd suggest there's a lot the not-tech industry could do to stop condoning abhorrent behavior that stops short of installing scanners on billions of computing devices. It's become a bit of a trope at this point, but it's bizarre to see a guy who is/was spokesman for a "minor attracted persons" (i.e. pedos) advocacy group getting published negatively reviewing the controversial new sex trafficking movie ... in Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-15/qanon-and-sound-of-freedom-both-rely-on-tired-hollywood-tropes#xj4y7vzkg
For some background:
https://www.opindia.com/2021/08/meet-noah-berlatsky-prostasia-foundation-wonder-woman-rutgers-university-press-author-normalising-pedophilia/
His 501(c)(3) non-profit also advocates in favor of pedophilic dolls and has a "No Children Harmed certification seal" program for pedophilic dolls/etc:
https://prostasia.org/blog/dolls-prevent-child-sexual-abuse/
https://prostasia.org/no-children-harmed/
I'm not sure you can criminalize stuff like this, but it sets off my alarm bells when pedophile advocates are being published in mainstream news at the same time there's a moral panic around the need to scan everyone's hard drives. Is society actually trying to solve this problem, or is this more like renewing the Patriot Act to record every American's phone calls at the same time we're allied with al Qaeda offshoots in Syria? Interesting how terrorism has been the primary other argument for banning/backdooring all encryption.
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As an aside I couldn't find ~anything about this group "Heat Initiative" Apple is responding to? Other than a TEDx talk by the founder a couple years ago which again seems very focused on "encrypted platforms" as the primary problem that needs solving: https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_gardner_searching_for_a_child_in_a_private_world
The well connected politically is the weird thing about this to me.
I think we can all agree that trafficking is…bad. Yet there seems to be this strange political push back against anti-trafficking efforts.
I’ve seen it for years to the point of pretending it’s not even a problem. The recent political reaction to Sound of Freedom, which was not a political movie, is just the latest example.
It’s one of the most worrisome aspects I’ve seen in general “politicize everything” trends.
I was hoping to read an objective essay but some flags pop up quite early. Early on, he talks about woke-bias in the media and woke-bias in the academic world. Ok. I'll check out his other articles and he has an interview with Chris Williamson, one of his idols. I look at Chris' stuff. He has an interview with some guy associated with the film Sound of Freedom. Ok, I'm getting big red flags here! So take what this guy says with a huge grain of salt. He's probably trying to push an anti-woke agenda. Oh yeah, another one of his articles is "Does Woke Ideology Make People Sick?".
> Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster,
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
“Bloomberg writer Noah Berlatsky, who recently penned an article attacking Sound of Freedom and moviegoers attending the film, was quickly exposed as a pro-pedophilia activist.”
“QAnon and ‘Sound of Freedom’ Both Rely on Tired Hollywood Tropes”
“Sex trafficking movies routinely skip over some very important questions, which gives the conspiratorial right room to run wild.”
However, this presupposes you can pick the guy who wrote the "Sound of Freedom" out from the rest of the dreck a priori.
Nobody can do that. Go down the list of films in 2023 on IMDB. How many of those didn't make back their money domestically? A LOT. The profit from even one of your movies barely pays for a single other flop.
Matt Damon commented in an interview that the problem was the collapse of DVD sales. With DVD sales, you could occasionally get a long slow burn after the movie was done (see: John Wick). Without DVD sales, it's either get it at the box office or you're done.
Sound of Freedom is being a profitable success (46M gross so far, 15M budget) and a trend to follow for religion-influenced movies bringing large audiences. It's not a one-off, we saw that with Jesus Revolution too (53M gross, 15M budget). When you are smart about the audience and costs, you can make a ton of money in the business still.
I have a theory that the low interest rates in the past several years created massive distortions in the movie business. Firstly, incredibly expensive movies that, while entertaining (like the last Indiana Jones), have very little hopes of turning a profit. Secondly, streaming services having mountains of money and making things that are, well, too good and unprofitable long term. For instance, according to some unofficial numbers, you can make four Sound of Freedoms with the budget of a single Amazon Lord of the Rings episode!
I was eagerly awaiting "Dial of Destiny" for months before its release, and it was marked on my calendar, which was redundant because it was already a special day in our family. I wrapped things up at home and got to the theater on Thursday (which is technical Opening Day because everything has to creep up in time like Black Friday starting at 9pm on Thanksgiving Night.)
Anyway, I immensely enjoyed "Dial of Destiny", and I saw it with a fairly good crowd, although the front three rows were less-populated. The auditorium had a gigantic screen and seat-shaking bass audio. I honestly didn't notice all the woke feminism until it was pointed out to me; I suppose I am inured to all that by now. But all the settings and the chases and the hokey artifacts were amazing to me, and I've always been a fan of Indy and Harrison. Special place in my heart.
Anyway, on Saturday I ventured to the same mall again to see "Sound of Freedom". Now the mall was packed, the multiplex was packed, and the auditorium was even more packed than before. I had an aisle seat in Row B, and seeing the screen was a little off-kilter. But the film was fantastic. It was gripping, exciting, repulsive, and triumphant. I was glad to have spent the money on that ticket and supported these moviemakers. In fact, I will be returning to see it tonight, because I told some friends and one of them has gathered a group for this outing. So, spread the word; this is the must-see film of the summer, and you can probably find free tickets, because many are being donated in a "pay-it-forward" movement.
Regarding etiquette: I've found people to be polite when I go to the movies. Sometimes someone peeks at their phone and the brightness is way up. But I think the management is fairly responsive if someone has a bad experience. I've lived in this major city for 24 years, and I've probably never encountered someone so rude that it ruined my movie, or I had to report to management. There used to be some really janky theaters in the bad part of town where it was normal to be snarky, and yell at the screen and throw popcorn and stuff, and sometimes we'd go there on purpose, because people can really be hilarious when it's a Rocky Horror attitude to some campy horror movie. But that's a social contract and not being rude to other patrons, you know?