Star Wars Dreams

Many American presidents have dreamed about an impermeable protective roof over the United States. After Pearl Harbor, the need for rigid defensive measures was urgent; America could no longer pursue its isolationist policies. During the Cold War, presidents Nixon and Reagan again pleaded for a rocket-based shield over America. Today, George Bush the Younger has breathed new life into the Star Wars programme by allotting 8.5 billion dollars to its creation. Director Leslie Woodhead, who previously gave us the award-winning Srebrenica documentary, A CRY FROM THE GRAVE, interviewed Robert McNamara, Defence Minister from the sixties, extreme hawks like Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon Defence Policy Board, and the late Dr. Edward Teller, the fierce anti-communist who served as a role model for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and who believed that x-ray lasers were the solutions to all international conflicts. Filled with indisputable fact, the film interweaves promotional footage from the fifties and sixties, with which the population was supposed to be ‘informed’ about potential attacks, and with campaign footage of ancient Presidential star warriors. But it is the current wizard, George W. Bush, who makes the film current: his designation of the ‘axis of evil’ is Reaganesque, with its conservative politics, imperial military power and fundamentalist religious underpinnings, Woodhead feels.