Why is the Sound of Freedom so Controversial?

Even amidst major releases like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Indiana Jones, the most talked about movie of the summer is a low-budget indie actioner that has broken every expectation to become one of the most successful movies of the year. The buzz surrounding Angel Studios’ low-budget investment in the Sound Of Freedom has turned a $15 million film into an internationally renowned success—grossing more than $160 million in its first month at the box office.

As Bulwark editor Sonny Bunch notes, the fact that the film is successfully “outgrossing this year’s Indy, Mission: Impossible, Creed, Transformers, and Fast and Furious entries is one of the wildest box office stories of the year.” However, its success has not come in a vacuum.

As the Sound of Freedom enters its second month in cinemas, it continues to draw more and more scrutiny from the mainstream media over its controversial depiction of child sex trafficking—a phrase that modern politics elicits fears surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, PizzaGate, and QAnon conspiracies.

Why Is The Sound Of Freedom Controversial?

The film itself has nothing to do with Jewish conspiracies, Satanic blood rituals, nor human sacrifice, a favorite topics of discussion for QAnon theorists, but it has suffered tremendously merely from the rhetorical association with those concepts. The film’s star, Jim Caviezel, spoke at a recent conference, opposing several prominent QAnon theorists and echoed a handful of their talking points uncritically; he earned the film’s label, “QAnon Adjacent.”

The film was supposed to be released by 20th Century Fox after it was shot in 2018. The Disney Corporation sat on the film for five years and kept it from being released, which is likely due to its intense and conspiratorial subject matter. This drew scrutiny from conservative critics who were already sensitive to the Disney Corporation’s allegations of “grooming” and promoting LGBTQ+ content—drawing paranoia that the film was purposely suppressed.

The majority of the outstanding criticism is both far more nuanced and rational but equally reactionary. The fact that moderate conservatives and conspiracy theorists are embracing the film has set off alarms among the more reactionary analysts in the media, saying the film is liked by bad people and is therefore bad by proxy.

It doesn’t help that the movie’s reception and audience has also been decidedly partisan like when President Donald Trump privately screened the film on July 19 and when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did the same on July 25 at the Capitol Visitor Center. The film has also been endorsed by radio host Ben Shapiro, pop psychologist, Jordan Peterson, and controversial actor, Mel Gibson, which is further drawing the ire of mainstream opinion. 

“Following that money leads back to a more unsavory network of astroturfed boosterism among the far-right fringe, a constellation of paranoids now attempting to spin a cause célèbre out of a movie with vaguely simpatico leaning,” says The Guardian film critic Charles Bramesco. “Those tuned in to the eardrum-perforation frequency of QAnon, however, have heeded a clarion call that leads right to the multiplex.”

What Does the Sound Of Freedom Get Wrong?

Very little of this has to do with the film itself, which by all rights is a fairly decent low-budget action drama. It suffers tremendously from all of the problems of low-budget movies, with cheap lighting and small-scale stakes, but it is fairly adapted by the standards of $15 million action films and mostly works around these issues effectively.

However, many critics have valid criticisms against the film and its subject matter, relating to how aggressively the film fictionalized and boils down complex real-life events and problems to make them palpable to film audiences. Some of these are openly acknowledged by the filmmakers in their online marketing as dramatizations for a “based on a true story” narrative, admitting that the entire third act of the film is fully fictitious. The script can be frustrating for how hagiographical it is in regards to its portrayal of real-life former Department of Homeland Security Agent, Tim Ballard.

Ballard has drawn the majority of media criticism. He is the creator of the modern human trafficking group, Operation Underground Railroad. OUR has faced a lot of scrutiny for using flashy and controversial ting tactics in its early years; it left multiple children with severe trauma, and the group was unable to provide appropriate aftercare. This style of activism is arguably ineffective as it does not break up larger operations or slow the overall global trade– anti-human trafficking organizations discourage it.

Multiple major publications including Vice News, Rolling Stone, Slate, and HuffPost have criticized Ballard’s methods. However, as the YouTuber Lore Lodge points out, some of these claims are malicious, lack context, and are based on out of date claims from early in the organization’s history. Many of these claims against him tied to active investigations he cannot/couldn’t comment on. It also does not help that Ballard has deep ties to the Trump Administration, which has further soured his reputation with the media. Although, many of these criticisms predate Trump or the movie and are, likely, partially true. 

The most cogent and thoughtful piece on the subject of the film comes from online scholar, Dr. Laura Robinson, who argues in a recent Substack series that the film’s similar good-evil action-movie moralism is not well-suited to the real-life issue of human trafficking; its complicated and perverse incentives have resulted in a destructive industry of “fake orphanages,” creating issues where charity from Christian churches and adoption organizations has turned into money-making opportunities for cynical profiteers in countries like Haiti. Children with parents are often falsely “sold” to orphanages and then trafficked to the U.S. to be adopted off-the-books by western families who want to help save children.

While government agencies do affirm that sex trafficking is a billion-dollar global industry, the actual nature of it is far more psychologically complex with friends and family members often grooming or pimping out people they already know, rather than shipping them around the world in shipping containers.

“The lines between good and evil are never so clear as when we’re talking about child trafficking. There are clear evil people who traffic children, and clear heroes who defeat them. And my response to this is: If you have been on a mission trip that visits orphanages, or you have supported a mission trip that does, there is a reasonably good chance that in your case, the lines are not as clear as you might think,” Dr. Robinson writes.

These realities don’t lend themselves to a cathartic action movie. Liam Neesan’s movies like Taken and Memory arguably exploit the concept far more aggressively than Sound of Freedom does. Framing the movie as a moralistic story of American charity and virtue triumphing against unquestioningly evil pedophiles boils down the global crime industry into a very narrow story, which raises questions about its effectiveness.

What Does the Sound Of Freedom Get Right?

All this complicated moral equivocation and blame-shifting ties into the very deep and destructive realities of modern social life where all aspects became part of culture wars and political rhetoric. Child sex abuse is a real practice, but the modern conversation on it is driven by QAnon activists who believe that political elites are Jewish vampires who suck the blood of innocent children in ritual sacrifice of the Canaanite God Moloch. The nuance of these conversations is lost when one side goes to such an extreme, the other side responds against the extremism, and the first uses that reaction as evidence of malice, claiming that the mainstream media is running defense of serial pedophiles.

“No one should question the importance of raising awareness of human trafficking or of working creatively and diligently to keep kids safe from the horror of sexual exploitation. What all moviegoers—especially our nation’s top lawmakers—must know, however, is that the depictions of child trafficking and the rescue tactics celebrated in this film are highly sensationalized, misleading and do more harm than good,” argues USA Today.

And yet, the victims of sex abuse remain unsaved and unloved. Thousands of innocent children are kidnapped from third-world countries, trapped into lives of sex slavery at this moment, pimped out to evil men and women around the world.

It is not a simple question to ask what The Sound Of Freedom gets wrong or right, because it has become the center of a much larger culture discussion on the subject of trafficking. The best that can be hoped for is that audiences of all stripes might walk out of the film with a renewed determination to tackle the subject of sex trafficking, learning to identify it, and help organizations that effectively fight it. 

But that still leaves the question of the film itself. What does this film with this story and these fictionalized elements get right about sex trafficking that other films do not?

Despite being a low budget and largely hagiographical character study, the movie has a surprisingly adept ability to explore the psychology of sex exploitation, particularly for Caviezel’s portrayal of Ballard. The real-life Tim Ballard is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints and Caviezel plays him as a stern, waspy father-figure with incredible combat skills and moral integrity. In his earliest scenes, we see this wholesome figure tortured both by the realization that all of his efforts with the Department of Homeland security aren’t actually saving kids. 

After he spends a night documenting evidence collected from one of his targets, which involves painstakingly transcribing the events of child porn video tapes, he tells his boss that the job has, in some ways, broken him, and he needs the psychological release of saving at least one child from the evils he constantly sees.

Whenever I’ve talked with police officers and probation officers who work in sensitive areas, the one thing I’ve taken away from those conversations is how destructive and soul crushing the reality of human trafficking and sex abuse is. The majority of child porn on the internet is produced in third-world countries, and the fate of the children involved is completely unclear but likely bleak. Many likely go on to lives of worse abuse or die young—alone and unloved.

Any police officer who has ever stumbled upon child porn on a defendant’s phone or computer can tell you the soul-destroying realization of having to watch individual frames of the most evil content ever created by man. When they get home from work, they jump into a cold shower to cry and process the evil they have witnessed.

If the Sound Of Freedom gets anything right, it is that. The fictional Ballard of the film’s motivation is his psychological need to redress one small crime in a world of unfixable evils. He goes to the ends of the earth and back just to save one young girl and restore one family, because the thought of staring into a young boy’s eyes and telling him he will never see his sister again is worse than death.

Can We All Agree To Agree?

And as far as supposedly right-wing propaganda films go, the execution of ideas has helped the movie receive significant critical acclaim from major reviewers. It has a surprisingly high ratings from critics on Rotton Tomatoes. As Variety film critic, Owen Gleiberman, writes, “You needn’t hold extreme beliefs to experience Sound of Freedom as a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.” Video reviewer Jeremy Jahns echoed this sentiment in his review too, arguing that the film brings attention to a valuable issue when taken purely as a fictional retelling.

The film only seems to grow with every box office weekend as it continues to expand to more theaters. Even in our irreconcilably divided culture, there should be hope that a low budget indie film managed to become the hit of the summer and create more discussion on the issue of sex trafficking than anything since the death of Jeffrey Epstein. The movie’s most famous quote “God’s children are not for sale” is as good as any mantra that anyone ought to get behind and hopefully people do.

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