Canal Zone
Canal Zone
7.4
CANAL ZONE is about the people who live and work in the Panama Canal Zone and shows both the operation of the Canal and the various governmental agencies — business, military, and civilian — related to the functioning of the Canal and the lives of the Americans in the zone. The film includes sequences of ships in transit, the work of special canal pilots, aspects of the civil government, work of the military, and the social, religious and recreational life of the Zonians.
Desmond Dale reviewedJanuary 24, 2025
The overarching theme of the documentary or rather the point it's making about the effects of American commercialism and nationalist propaganda are close to my heart and are usually right up my alley. However I just found the documentary to be a chore to get through and there are so many instances where it's depicting characters or mundane events that I found hard to decipher in terms of how they speak to the main themes.
I would posit that a lot of my hangups rest squarely on my lack of intelligence and ability to deduce narratives without having them spelled out bluntly for me. Wisemen seems like the type of documentary director who likes to let his footage speak for itself with little narrative guidance or interjection. By the end, the footage ramps up in intensity and really drives home its key themes, but there were simply too many times when I found myself completely lost and devoid of feeling, staring out at the images of the screen like the pages of a school textbook.