So I guess ‘The East’ is supposed to be the official Hollywood take on the Occupy movement. I guess it had to happen sometime, but it shouldn’t have happened this way.

The East is the enigmatic name of a peculiar bunch of anti-corporate freegans who stage public shamings of misbehaving institutions. If you’re the CEO of a company that spills oil, they fill your personal HVAC system with motor oil. Pollute a lake, they contrive to feed you lakewater and force you into the drink on camera.

Brit Marling (Sound of My Voice, Another Earth) plays a corporate spy tasked with infiltrating the group and helping to neutralize them so as to protect the stock prices of her clients. Fortunately she’s pretty, well-scrubbed and soulful-looking – her instant admittance into the paranoid, secretive terrorist cell is inevitable and frictionless.

From there the film takes exactly no unexpected turns, and telegraphs every punch as if the intended audience is people with a history of head trauma.

As annoying as these things are, I have to say that my main struggle with the movie is the churlishness of its message. In some sort of misguided attempt to see both sides of the issue, it boils down the outrage of a generation at the criminal malfeasance of its institutions into some sort of After-School Special about daddy issues. It’s hard not to come away with the idea that the filmmakers think the real problem is that the protesters are spoiled idealists who need to get in touch with the real world. Also, the polluters and poisoners in the film are just honest folk trying to make a living who don’t know how things ever got so messy. This opinion is excusable in a dotty grandma, perhaps, but it’s a shocking misapprehension of the situation for anyone who has been intellectually present for the last decade or so.

‘The East’ is a misfire full of earnest and talented filmmakers. I can’t recommend it, and that makes me a little sad. The Occupy movement deserves a silver screen portrayal as much as every other social movement does, and I hope this doesn’t become that film.