The raw material is certainly there, if often unshaped. Fell and Thompson started the film while at Rice University and the film that resulted from that beginning indeed has the feel of a school project, albeit an uncommonly ambitious one. The focus here is fortunately not encompassing the entire debate but rather on the more dedicated elements of the pro-life movement. The filmmakers pile together their subjects together in clumps, starting with the Christian students taking pro-life propaganda classes sponsored by Focus on the Family -- whose 49-acre Colorado campus is like a theocratic Christian youth boot camp. Well-groomed and bright youths watch videos while an energetic lecturer from the Justice For All organization points out techniques for converting staunchly pro-choice students. Then we watch as those same kids drop into college campuses, set up a massive and stomach-churning display comparing historical genocides with abortion, and wait for the fireworks to start.
It's a telling start, as Unborn in the USA is more about the process of the pro-life movement than it is about its philosophical underpinnings. It's a first-person account for the most part, making the unconventional choice not to spread its interviewees across the political spectrum (throwing in talking-head interviews with experts and professors of differing ideologies for perspective, say). So the filmmakers offer up the movement's strategists and tacticians, a convicted clinic bomber here, and there the woman who took the infamous photographs of mangled, discarded fetuses still emblazoned on pro-life posters today. The interviewees, given an honest reckoning without hostile editing, are with a few exceptions well-spoken, organized, and highly dedicated, jazzed on the idea of fighting for a cause with tactics that skirt the edge of legality (some, like the delusional head of the fringe and borderline-terrorist group 'Army of God,' just leap right over that edge).
Although seeming at times less a cohesive documentary than a series of loosely-linked interview clumps, Unborn in the USA is inarguably topical in its treatment of these often ignored activists; the kind who don't approve of those clinic bombers but aren't really that upset by them. It's a snapshot of a well-funded political underground that doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon -- something that will be either heart-warming or bone-chilling, depending on where you stand.
High five.
