Chronologically, at the begging and end of this thread, you'll see the same 1 star post in 2010 and 2018 ...bashing Sean Penn and calling this movie 'political lies and half truths'...and actually blaming Clinton, using what he doesn't realize are lies, to do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's stuff like that, that gave us our problems today and why movies like this should be seen by everybody. I know a review that talks about another review is not what this is supposed to be about, but anything like that post which is full of the exact things he complains about, and may keep someone from watching an excellent movie that shows is just how corrupt an administration can be and the damage and deaths it causes, is a big deal to me. The movie shows exactly why this country lost the respect of the entire developed world because of our invasion of Iraq. Millions of people, our allies, protested it in the streets all over the world.If you followed this story closely at the time like I did, you'd know that this movie is exactly the truth .. and Penn, considered one of best actors today, couldn't have been better in it.If this was all lies, why did Scooter Libby go to prison, indicted on five felony counts for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice?Even more ridiculous, the commentor says this is just propaganda to make Bush look like a war monger.....ignoring everything that came out later and all the proof that came out that showed us that the entire Iraq war was based on lies...from the Bush administration and the real fake news was on the you know what news station.

I shouldn't have even started to watch this seeing Sean Penn was in it. The facts are wrong. Showing clips of speeches to make a point. Most of the data on the Iraq war was collected by Clinton administration. Yes including Kerry and Gore. Clinton just didn't act on it. Which he said literally the day before 9/11. It didn't have to happen. This movie makes the Bush administration look like war mongrels changing facts to justify the war they supposedly wanted.

Could a government be so-shortsightedly stupid as to out one of its own special agents as a punishment for her husband offering them some advice they didn't want to hear? Apparently so, when the government was the G.W. Bush administration, and what was at stake was the justification of a war in Iraq that the government had already decided to undertake regardless. That story is told in this film; but the movie is limited, because almost inevitably, it paints Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame as heroic, truth-telling victims - which may be true, but the scope for real drama is limited. At times in the story, when events are putting a strain on their marriage, the couple seem to be fighting over the principle of their two different visions of the noblest way to respond to the crisis they've been plunged into. The greatest tragedy, the betrayal of Plame's agents in the field, is relatively underplayed in this Washington-centred story. Sean Penn as Wilson (Plame's husband) plays his role as a self-righteous prig (in a way that I don't think is intended); Naomi Watts seems too super-cool as Plame to be believable, until the film cuts to actual footage of the real Plame giving testimony before Congress, and the likeness turns out to be exact. The film's worth watching if you want to learn the details of the scandal (and you should); but it's something less than Shakespearian in the telling.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn were magnificent as Valerie Plame Wilson and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the t-i-g-h-t film by Director Doug Liman (who also did "The Bourne Identity"), is s-e-n-s-a-t-i-o-n-a-l! The DVD has awesome reality to it and includes much actual material extras from Valerie and Joe - who stood up against hideous White House lies - particularly over invading Iraq - and who both deserve much credit as national / public heroes. Geo. Bush, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove all could have gone to jail for their acts and their lies r/t Iraq (and r/t the Wilsons) - as could quite a few others. Scooter wound up as the sole 'patsy'.Scooter Libby interestingly, was sentenced to a few years in jail, a couple in paroled supervision, and about 400hrs. of community service and he was fined a quarter million (not a problem as he was worth as much as 25 million) - but Bush kept him from going to prison. He was / is the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since John Poindexter, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the Iran–Contra affair. My theory is that like with Nixon, Libby was made the "fall-guy" partly because he was Jewish. Nixon had failed to shift much blame for various things onto Kissinger, but clearly had planned to and even attempted it a few times.