“Shock and Awe” — directed by and starring Rob Reiner — features an award-winning ensemble cast, including Woody Harrelson, James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich.
The conspiracy was real. Their theory was right. This story is true.
In 2003, the White House administration made a case for the invasion of Iraq. The facts didn’t add up, and only one team of journalists got the story right.
“Shock and Awe” is the story of these journalists and what it is like to hunt for the truth when the stakes are life, death and American democracy.
The story of how, following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush's White House diverted public opinion from the culpable Osama bin Laden to the extraneous Saddam Hussein is a gripping one. The administration's objective was to have an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and its methodology, as one insider explains, was the reverse of normal procedure: First they made the decision, then searched for intelligence to support it.
As government figures like Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice build the case for Saddam's fabled WMDs, reporters Jonathan Landay (Harrelson) and Warren Strobel (Marsden) hear a very different story from their numerous inside sources, who are not named in the film, presumably to continue to protect their identities. They reveal to the incredulous Knight Ridder duo the administration's nefarious plan to shift the war to Iraq, while everyone knows bin Laden is in hiding somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan.