Why Are People Hating on 'Sound of Freedom'?

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

A movie that sounds the alarm about children being sex-trafficked should draw the interest of just about anyone with a heart. In fact, since its July 4 release, Sound of Freedom has grossed more than $50 million at the box office, going toe to toe with two highly touted Hollywood movies, Insidious: The Red Door and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Right now, Sound of Freedom is one of the highest grossing box office releases of 2023.

That’s pretty impressive for a movie that sat around for five years waiting for distribution. Disney owned the rights to Sound of Freedom when it acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, but the film was shelved by Disney executives. It seemed the movie would never reach theaters. Then in 2022, Angel Studios, the faith-based media company that produces the streaming series The Chosen, convinced some of its investors to contribute $5 million to release the film to the masses. The risk paid off, as Sound of Freedom commanded large audiences the first few weeks of its release.

It’s also impressive that the movie has garnered this much favorable attention, since many major media outlets have gone beyond criticizing how the film was made; they’ve labeled the entire premise misleading, meaningless or false.

“Sound of Freedom: The Q’Anon-adjacent Thriller Seducing America,” blared the Guardian headline.

“The trafficking follows no motivation more elaborate than the servicing of rich predators, eliding all talk of body-part black markets and the precious organic biochemical of adrenochrome harvested as a Satanic key to eternal life. The first rule of QAnon: you don’t talk about QAnon where the normals can hear you.” In other words, the reviewer is saying that the movie doesn’t mention any type of Q’Anon theory about sex trafficking; therefore, we must assume the movie is sending subliminal messages about Q’Anon.

Make sense? Of course not.

As startling as the so-called review in the Guardian was, what followed in Rolling Stone was even more implausible. “Sound of Freedom Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms.” Reading the RS article makes someone who has seen the movie wonder if a different version was shown to the media.

“It’s a stomach-turning experience, fetishizing the torture of its child victims and lingering over lush preludes to their sexual abuse,” the reviewer insists. “At times I had the uncomfortable sense that I might be arrested myself just for sitting through it.”

If there’s one thing Sound of Freedom does not do it’s fetishize. The audience does not see anything remotely sexual during the movie. Of course illicit activities are eluded to, but that’s so the audience can grasp the depraved nature of what’s happening to the children.

Most disturbing in this RS review is the writer’s insistence that sex trafficking is not that big of a deal in the scheme of things.

“There is visible suffering all around us in America. There are poor and unhoused, and people brutalized or killed by police. There are mass shootings, lack of healthcare, climate disasters. And yet, over and over, the far right turns to these sordid fantasies about godless monsters hurting children. Now, as in the 1980s Satanic panic, they won’t even face the fact that most kids who suffer sexual abuse are harmed not by a shadowy cabal of strangers, but at the hands of a family member.”

It’s as if the writer was denied access to statistics about sex trafficking.

In both the Guardian and Rolling Stone reviews, the audiences are described as, basically, old white MAGA men who will fall for anything, especially if it has an all-American white hero at the center of it.

From the Guardian: “Judging by the robust round of applause that concluded the fully-seated screening I attended on Wednesday evening – and this, in the liberal Sodom of Manhattan! – it would seem that the folks at the two-year-old Angel Studios have tapped into a substantial and eagerly marshaled viewership.”

And from Rolling Stone: “The mostly white-haired audience around me could be relied on to gasp, moan in pity, mutter condemnations, applaud, and bellow ‘Amen!’ at moments of righteous fury, as when Ballard declares that ‘God’s children are not for sale.’ They were entranced by what they clearly took for a searing exposé.”

What’s going on here?

It’s fair to criticize the movie itself. Sound of Freedom won’t likely garner any Oscar nominations. At times, director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde plays too heavily on the heartstrings; at other times, he fails to fully develop characters. A reviewer’s job is to point out the flaws as well as the successes. Doing so helps moviegoers determine if a film is worth seeing. In the case of Sound of Freedom, a lot of the negative media hype has revolved around its alleged Q’Anon relationships.

First, a little background. Q’Anon got its start on 4Chan, an anonymous internet forum. Postings by the mysterious “Q” suggested that then-President Trump was fighting against the Deep State, which was doing some really nasty stuff.

In 2016, Q’Anon claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton were heading up a child sex abuse ring in the basement of a DC pizza shop. The story motivated a man to drive from North Carolina to the shop with a rifle to get to the bottom of what had been dubbed “Pizzagate.” He didn’t find a child sex ring, but he was arrested and eventually sentenced to four years in prison.

What do Q’Anon conspiracy theories have to do with Sound of Freedom? The Washington Post explains it this way:

“The film is controversial because the man the movie is about, former Homeland Security operative Tim Ballard, and the actor who plays him, Jim Caviezel, both have links to QAnon. Ballard has promoted the baseless claim that furniture retailer Wayfair was involved in child trafficking. Caviezel has spoken at multiple QAnon events. In an interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, he promoted one of the cult’s most outrageous conspiracy theories, claiming that child traffickers drain their victim’s blood to create a serum to prevent aging.”

Actually, it was during an online conservative convention in April that Caviezel claimed people were harvesting adrenaline, not blood, from children. But let’s not be picky.

The point is that Caviezel has repeated some claims that so far have no evidence to back them up. But Caviezel says he did not know about Q’Anon while he was making Sound of Freedom back in 2018.

For his part, Ballard is flummoxed as to why the theme of child sex trafficking as a global crisis is being overshadowed by cries of the movie being Q’Anon-adjacent.

'They make zero connection to the actual story,” Ballard said in a recent interview. “It’s very difficult to make that connection when it’s actually based on a true story. Why would you want to lie to push an agenda whose goal is to have children be in captivity? It’s kind of sick.”

It’s at the very least bizarre. To deflect from the story on the screen is to deny the value of the millions of children who have been trafficked around the world. We know that it happens in the United States. Just this week, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. announced the arrest and arraignment of a 37-year-old man accused of arranging and facilitating sexual encounters with minors in exchange for money.

In Central America, where much of Sound of Freedom takes place, children in poor countries are at high risk of being trafficked. Sometimes, they are taken to Mexico and then into the United States.

“Human traffickers in Central America target public squares and migrant shelters. They exploit the vulnerabilities of victims by either promising false work opportunities or use physical force that compels victims to go along with traffickers out of fear that either they or their families will be harmed if they don’t cooperate,” says Dr. Jarrod Sadulski a criminal justice and homeland security professor.

“Researchers from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime discovered that smugglers work with human traffickers as part of a mutually profitable business that encourages smugglers to bring children directly to human trafficking networks,” he adds.

Final thoughts.

Simply stated, child sex trafficking is bad. Putting Q’Anon conspiracies aside, there is no reason to downplay the barbaric abuse of children for monetary gain. Whether the story of Tim Ballard has been embellished - by the film or by Ballard himself - is immaterial. It’s a movie, after all, not a documentary. And whether Ballard and Caviezel are card-carrying members of Q’Anon or have fallen victim to outlandish claims made by others should not deter anyone from seeing Sound of Freedom and learning as much as possible about child sex trafficking. It is indeed a “stomach-turning experience,” but one we must face if we hope to do anything about it.