Trailer Talk: '99%' Mocks Romney, Praises Obama, Ignores Occupy's Violence

Our first official look at a documentary detailing the rise of Occupy Wall Street offers few surprises–beyond the fact that it exists at all.

OWS hit the country roughly two years ago. Today, good luck finding any Occupy tents in a city near you.

99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film is coming next month all the same thanks to Participant Media, the company behind the new social justice channel Pivot.

The trailer offers a glowing look at a movement known for violence and vitriol–assuming you read New Media. That’s not what we see here. Instead, it’s class warfare 101, with video of Mitt Romney saying corporations are people served up for mockery. Because, you know, Romney won the presidential election last year and is now in charge of a failing recovery.

Oh, wait.

Later, we catch a glimpse of President Barack Obama, whose leadership has helped increase the divide between the rich and the poor and kept the unemployment rate alarmingly high, espousing some of the movement’s generic talking points.

The trailer does have its darkly comic moments.

“They consider Occupy to be verging on a domestic terrorist threat,” one supporter says, perhaps unaware that a group of Ohio-based Occupiers planned to blow up a bridge.

The trailer wraps with a wide-eyed woman saying, “It feels like something’s finally being done.”

Occupy today is all but dead, but one film already captured some of the reasons why long before this current whitewash project. The 2012 documentary Occupy Unmasked, featuring the late Andrew Breitbart, revealed the movement’s disturbing roots while showcasing its violence, acts of rape, drug abuse and other vile tendencies. The film also shredded the media for covering up the aforementioned issues.

99% will still likely get more media attention given its pro-OWS narrative, but even mainstream outlets are smelling the spin coming off the project. 

The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the film during its festival run, dubbing it “populist puff.”

The whole world won’t be watching this documentary, which glorifies the various Occupy movements. Here at left-leaning Sundance, this populist puff was akin to preaching to the choir.