War Against the Weak (Justin Strawhand, 2009): USA

Reviewed by Jesse Solomon. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

War Against the Weak is a documentary by Justin Strawhand about the history of American Eugenics. The film focuses on the life and works of Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, the founders of the eugenics theory and practices. The film is shown in various forms of historical reenactments, and voice over narration.

Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with perceived intelligence factors that were often correlated strongly with social class. Many eugenicists took inspiration from the selective breeding of animals as their analogy for improving human society, which lead to the practices of sterilization, and euthanasia of those were seen to be “feeble minded” or had some sort of mental illness or hereditary disease. At the time this concept appeared to have some scientific support, and it remained a contentious issue for years, and continued on to be the driving force in Hitler’s quest to create a perfect race. In short, the theory of eugenics that these two American men came up with lead to the creation of the word, genocide. Their discriminating, unjustified treatment protocols for many of the mentally disabled persons living during the late 1880’s in America lead to thousands of deaths, and their theories inspired the greatest travesty the world has ever seen, the holocaust.

This film was incredible eye opening and disturbing at the same time. The use of color in the film was dramatic and meant to cause uneasiness. The music played throughout the film was dark and eerie and made it almost impossible to look away. To be honest I wanted to leave about 20 minutes into the film, but seeing as I was in the middle of the row I convinced myself that I had to see the end to this horrid movie so that I could know whether these two men got what they had coming to them. Forty-five minutes later they hadn’t even touched on the holocaust, and the points of death and discrimination were so repetitive I almost gouged my eyes out. And then just when I thought the movie was going to end in disgusting bliss they started talking about the holocaust, I have never seen so many still shots of death in one movie. The ending gave me no satisfaction for wasting 93 minutes of my life watching a disturbing, repetitive, horrible movie called the War of the Weak. Next time I’d rather go spend ten dollars and see Marley & Me.