This is a film that fails in several ways. It opens without providing the viewer with any sense of Sarah's beliefs, background, and reasons for working for what eventually we come to understand is a corrupt and unprincipled private security firm. Without establishing this starting point, there is no basis or gauge that we could use to understand Sarah's apparent change-of-heart as the story unfolds. The film also fails by stacking the deck against the East movement and making it almost impossible for the viewer to identify with their actions. The dumpster diving, their ragged appearance, and the ridiculous dinner at which they sit in straight-jackets and eat by picking up spoons with their mouths all serve not to make them sympathetic but only to alienate them from us. The dinner scene is so bizarre and aggressively ludicrous that it short-circuits whatever sympathy and identification we might have with their political actions. Finally, the film fails by ending not with a bang but a whimper as we see Sarah in various brief scenes in which she seems to be meeting individually with other undercover agents for the secretive private security firm and attempting to persuade them of the negative consequences of their actions. So, in the end, the film backs off from any conviction concerning the necessity of social movements or collective action to resolve social ills and instead valorizes the reactionary concept of the power of the individual, armed with nothing but logic and reason, to change the world. This notion doesn't change the world but only serves to reproduce the class structure and allow capitalist polluters and profiteers to sleep easy.
Review of The East
