This film's big problems

In the wake of NZ's recent, Breivik-inspired disaster I got around to watching July 22 on Netflix. The basic plan of the film is as follows: the first third restages Breivik's attacks, and the remainder is split about evenly between following Breivik's trial and following the rehab of a seriously injured attack survivor, Viljar. The biggest problem with the film for me is that it leaves Breivik's ideology/politics insufficiently rebutted.

The problems begin with the fact that the actor playing Breivik, Anders Danielsen Lie is *much* better-looking than the original, and in my view Lie's Breivik is much less whiney and pathetically video-games-obsessed than the original. The upshot is that the film glamorizes Breivik. As for refuting Breivik's monstrous ideology, the film literally seems to believe that just (i) revealing that B. was & is a literal Nazi-sympathizer, e.g., by showing him doing Nazi salutes in court, and (ii) showing that B. ended up in indefinite solitary confinement (note that B.'s actual sentence was a little more complicated in accordance with Norwegian law, but I take Greengrass's simplified presentation to be reasonable) and explicitly contrasting this with his live victims' (esp. Viljar's) on-going, rich social milieus is counter-argument enough. But it really isn't. No kid who's tempted to think that Breivik and other extremists have a kind of 'red pill', and that they are on to some truths that mainstream society reflexively suppresses and evades, will watch 22 July and agree that Breivik was answered let alone comprehensively rebutted.

I dare say too that filming July 22 in Norway-accented English rather than using subtitles inadvertently builds the case for Breivik as a global figure, for the applicablility of his views everywhere.