Team America
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Team America |
| Original title | Team America: World Police |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2004 |
| length | approx. 98 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Trey Parker |
| script | Trey Parker Matt Stone Pam Brady |
| production |
Scott Aversano Anne Garefino Scott Rudin |
| music | Harry Gregson-Williams |
| camera | Bill Pope |
| cut | Thomas M. Vogt |
Team America (original and alternate title: Team America: World Police ) is an American puppet film directed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone from 2004. The film caricatures the aggressive American foreign policy and the appearance of the USA as the world police, the Islamist Terrorism , the then North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il , but also the naive pacifism of liberal American actors with Alec Baldwin as spokesman.
action
World Team America, an elite US anti-terrorist unit, loses one of its members (Carlson) when it demolishes half of Paris and destroys the Eiffel Tower , Arc de Triomphe and Louvre in eliminating terrorists from the Middle East .
To replace the dead team member, leader Spottswoode hires the gifted Broadway actor Gary Johnston (who is struggling with a traumatic childhood experience), as a world-class actor is the only one who, disguised as a terrorist, is able to go unrecognized to mingle with the terrorists. Gary Johnston also has foreign language skills.
A subsequent mission in Cairo seems to be a success: Although the team blows up half the city and the most famous Egyptian sights ( Pyramids of Giza , the Sphinx , Abu Simbel ), Gary succeeds in infiltrating the terrorists and detonating them . During the happy victory celebration inside Mount Rushmore , Lisa, who is still suffering from the loss of her colleague and fiancé Carlson, and Gary, who blames himself for his brother's tragic accidental death, get closer and spend a passionate night of love together.
But the counter-attack was immediately followed: The assassins from Derka Derkastan in the Far East, enraged by the team's activities in Cairo, blew up the Panama Canal and killed thousands of people. During the subsequent TV coverage, Gary's childhood trauma reappears and he suffers a mental breakdown. His affair with Lisa also comes to light, which leads to an open break in the friendship between Lisa and Sarah, who also has her eye on Gary. Joe, who is secretly in love with Sarah, is deeply depressed. Gary is desperate to run away.
Without Gary, the team goes to Derka Derkastan to start a counterattack. To their astonishment, North Korean planes and submarines suddenly appear alongside the derka derkastani fighter jets. Despite the problematic relationships within the team, they do quite well at first. While a demonstration of peace activists led by Michael Moore loudly protested against the stupid brutality of Team America in front of Mount Rushmore , Spottswoode inside was able to coordinate the combat activities very well with the supercomputer INTELLIGENCE. However, when Michael Moore entered the headquarters with a belted explosives belt and blew himself up together with the same, the now headless Team Americans were wiped out by the Derka-Derkastanis and suddenly intervening North Korean fighter jets.
As it turns out, behind it all is the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il , who suffers from a terrible inferiority complex and wants to destroy the whole world with weapons of mass destruction out of revenge on everything and everyone. He is supported in this by a group of megalomaniac Hollywood actor-pacifists under the leadership of Alec Baldwin, who believe that, together with Kim Jong-il, they can achieve world peace according to their ideas.
Meanwhile, the completely wrecked Gary Johnston sits in a bar and gets drunk. After talking to an old fur seal who tells him a few things about human nature, Gary vomits, is thrown out and ends up in the gutter. At the same time, Kim Jong-il's prisoner-of-war team is being tortured.
The next day, in search of himself, Gary drives to Mount Rushmore and is appalled by the picture looming in front of him. Inside the completely destroyed headquarters he finds the injured but lively Spottswoode, who is now increasingly paranoid. Gary offers to help, but Spottswoode disdains it with contempt. Only after Gary Spottswoode was able to convince Spottswoode through a really one hundred percent vote of confidence ( oral sex ) that he meant business, he was trained by Spottswoode in all kinds of hand-to-hand combat techniques and weapons and sent on a rescue mission.
In North Korea, Kim Jong-il's plan is slowly approaching its climax: He has invited all the heads of government on the planet to a peace conference, which he intends to employ with a Korean folklore show and a lecture by keynote speaker Alec Baldwin in order to activate the weapons of mass destruction at the end of the show to bomb all states of the world to the level of third world countries. Its aim is to bring all countries and people on earth to the same level of development and thus to no longer give anyone a reason to be jealous of others.
Gary breaks into Kim Jong-il's palace and free his teammates. Skeptical at first, but after Spottswoode has revealed himself to be alive, equipped with a new fighting spirit, they set about preventing the impending end of the world. The organization of the Actor-Pacifists FAG opposes them, and the team has to laboriously fight its way to the peace conference in several skirmishes.
Alec Baldwin has already spoken there, and Gary is being asked by his team members to face him. Since Baldwin is Gary's idol, he initially doubts whether he will be able to do so and, in fact, fails to convince the audience of the true background of the conference. Only when he remembered the sea dog's speech in the bar during the speech duel can he pull the conference participants to his side with a fiery speech and turn them against Kim Jong-il and the FAG.
This is so angry that he shoots Baldwin and starts the countdown for weapons of mass destruction. At the last second, the team can deactivate the countdown and kill Kim Jong-il by throwing him off a balcony and being staked from the pimple hood by the German representative at the conference.
It turns out that Kim Jong-il is an alien, cockroach-like life form that used the human shell of Kim Jong-il. After the insect creature crawls out of the mouth of Kim's body, it escapes into a spaceship and leaves the earth. The team members are reconciled, the world is saved, and Team America is now continuing its work as "World Police" with Gary as a permanent fifth member.
Cast and dubbing
| Role (original) | speaker | German speaker |
|---|---|---|
| Gary Johnston | Trey Parker | Simon hunter |
| Chris | Matt Stone | Benjamin Völz |
| Lisa | Kristen Miller | Melanie Hinze |
| Sarah | Masasa Moyo | Manja Doering |
| Joe | Trey Parker | Stefan Krause |
| Carson | Trey Parker | Peter Flechtner |
| Spottswoode | To Norris | Tilo Schmitz |
| INTELLIGENCE | Phil Hendrie | Norbert Gescher |
| Kim Jong-il | Trey Parker | Stefan Gossler |
| Hans Blix | Trey Parker | Helmut Gauss |
| Tim Robbins , Sean Penn , Michael Moore | Trey Parker | Tobias Master |
| Alec Baldwin | Maurice LaMarche | Klaus-Dieter Klebsch |
| Matt Damon | Trey Parker | Original sound |
| Susan Sarandon | Trey Parker | Kerstin Sanders-Dornseif |
| Martin Sheen | Matt Stone | Roland Hemmo |
background
- Based on the British puppet action series Thunderbirds (in Supermarionation ), the creators originally wanted to shoot a parody of the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow , which was to be released at the same time as the original. Here, however, there were just as much licensing problems as with the alternative, a new edition of Thunderbirds , and so they decided on the satirical concept of Team America .
- The puppets are much more developed than normal editions, they have their own facial expressions and are capable of relatively complex movement sequences.
- In terms of content, the film deals with US foreign policy, terror, sexuality and the overconfidence of American actors in some extremely drastic scenes. Numerous other films are also dragged through the cocoa, minorities insulted and a large number of real people brutally killed, such as the members of the fictional Film Actors Guild [FAG (English, colloquially "fagot")] such as Helen Hunt , George Clooney , Janeane Garofalo , Samuel L. Jackson , Liv Tyler , Susan Sarandon , Sean Penn , Danny Glover , Matt Damon , Tim Robbins , Martin Sheen , Bush critic Michael Moore and many more.
- The song “America, Fuck Yeah” caricatures American culture through an exaggerated enthusiasm for American values and achievements, such as freedom, the Internet, pornography, Walmart and silicone breasts.
- Basic idea: The film criticizes and caricatures actors and politicians alike, and even brings together aspects of both professional groups. The facade and the spectacle of the politicians, as well as the entertainment aspect towards the population, are shown as political means of maintaining and creating power. The showdown at the end of the film is characterized on the one hand by violence and on the other by the ability to play something for an audience.
- At the same time, the film also uses "normal" humor and contains some running gags and word games that make fun of typical action films. For example, in a battle with team member Sarah , Helen Hunt said, "Come here bitch, I made action films."
- The puppet sex scene has been cut. The uncensored version also shows sexual acts with urophilia (urine) and coprophilia (feces). According to the two authors, however, these scenes were not intended for the end product, but were deliberately exaggerated in order to offer the critical censorship authority MPAA scenes for censorship in order to distract from other "censorship-ready" content of the film.
- The German representative at the World Peace Conference is Kaiser Wilhelm II .
- The representatives of England and the USA cannot be recognized in the film. These are Queen Elizabeth II and George W. Bush .
- The terrorists are portrayed as dumb darklings with a scowl. Only in one scene do they show themselves from their human side and shed tears of pity when Gary Johnson played for them credibly and told how the infidels destroyed his home village. On the basis of their clothing, one can assign them to the Central Asian as well as the Arab cultural area.
- Kim Jong Il is portrayed as aggressive and irritable. He shoots his interpreter because he does not translate his words energetically enough and accuses Hans Blix of the sharks when he threatens him that the UN is very angry with him and that he will write an angry letter if he doesn't cooperate and his palace searches for weapons of mass destruction. In his song “I'm So Ronery” he expresses the fact that he sees himself as a deeply misunderstood genius who only wants the best for humanity. While he is uttering his lament, you can see tortured and ill-treated prisoners in the background.
- The terrorists around the world speak a fictional language that is similar to Arabic and in which the word “derka” occurs frequently. In addition, Derka Derkastan is a fictional country.
- The film is structured according to the scheme of a musical , as there are many songs composed by Trey Parker himself, such as "Everyone Has AIDS " (German: Alle haben AIDS), "Freedom Isn't Free" (German: Freedom is not free), “Only A Woman”, “ Pearl Harbor Sucked”, “America, Fuck Yeah!”, “I'm So Ronery” (sung by Kim Jong-Il, who swapped the letters “L” and “R”, as a clichéd pronunciation by East Asians), as well as North Korean folklore.
- Kim Jong Il never commented on the film, but North Korean diplomats in the Czech Republic tried to ban the film from theaters.
Reviews
“Instead of actors, puppets act to comment on the“ war on terror ” in a nihilistic attitude . The ludicrous-looking action and political satire ends in insults to politicians and actors. In terms of content, racist jokes and breaking taboos combine to create a confused anarchism. Aesthetically, the film fails due to its inconclusive concept and a sequence of cuts that often misses the satirical punch lines. "
“Team America” is a mixture of Jerry Bruckheimer action and Augsburger Puppenkiste, mixed with Harald Schmidt humor. Nobody is spared here: opponents of war, warmongers, everyone gets caught in the crossfire of Parker's and Trey's juvenile humor. At first glance, the film seems to be the logical continuation of the TV series “ Southpark ”. In the brashly streaked small-town world populated by broken kids, everything was faked that could have any cultural significance - from stem cell research to Pokémon to the “ Passion of Christ ”. “Team America” is now tackling the US government with its general attitude and its prominent opponents. [...] Perhaps “Team America” is just rebellious, loud, shrill and mean, a film joke that recklessly adolescents over the ideological itself. Good, bad, right, left - what does it matter when the whole world is literally populated with wooden heads. "
“The film Team America, for example, has all the ingredients of bad taste. You see marionettes, between the Augsburg doll box and Barbie appearance, throw up, fuck, massacre and, you think, even smoke. It is not only the fictional world policemen who are screwed, but also the liberals, the “doves” among Hollywood actors. [...] The real target is Hollywood itself; as a parody of Jerry Bruckheimer productions and the combination of mindless action and soap opera relationship quark, of James Bond fantasies and Ridley Scott nihilism, the piece works splendidly ”
“At the same time, the film is not just a parody of blockbusters in recent film history, such as those written by Jerry Bruckheimer (“ Top Gun ”,“ Armageddon ”,“ Black Hawk Down ”,“ Pearl Harbor ”etc.), or of popular ones TV series like “Power Rangers”, “A-Team” or “Captain Power”. Rather, the film is an elaborate, low-tech commentary on the fantasy according to which all Hollywood actors will be replaced by computer animations in the foreseeable future: in the opening scene, a marionette ends a matrix-style fight with one known from computer games Voice and the words: «You Lose!» "
publication
After its theatrical release on October 15, 2004, the film returned to box offices with a production budget of approximately $ 30 million worldwide, including $ 32 million in the United States. After it was released on December 30, 2004, 160,065 cinema-goers saw it in Germany.
Web links
- Team America in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Team America at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- Team America at Metacritic (English)
- Team America in the online film database
- Team America in the German dubbing file
- Comparison of the cut versions Theatrical Version - Unrated from Team America: World Police at Schnittberichte.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ 'Team America' unsettles Team Kim in Pyongyang . Worldtribune.com. Archived from the original on January 18, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 9, 2011.
- ↑ Team America. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Daniel Haas: Bomb mood everywhere on Spiegel Online from, accessed on December 9, 2011
- ↑ Georg Seeßlen: Now all puppets are fighting on freitag.de from January 7, 2005, accessed on December 9, 2011
- ↑ Martin Conrads: Puppen unter Kamasutrazwang ( Memento from January 2, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) on Netzeitung.de from December 30, 2004, accessed on October 16, 2014
- ↑ Team America: at boxofficemojo.com (English), accessed December 9, 2011
- ↑ TOP 100 DEUTSCHLAND 2004 on insidekino.de , accessed on December 9, 2011
