It seems that with Arizona busy stoking up discord between white people and hispanics with their rather over the top plans to deal with illegal immigrants and controlling the border, Robert Rodriguez’s upcoming Machete has got caught up in the crossfire, with some people now claiming that it’s going to start a race war!
The issue first emerged when Rodriguez released an ‘illegal’ trailer for the film on Cinco De Mayo, which seemed to suggest the fim would be about Danny Trejo’s Machete fighting back against racist whites, with the lead character even introducing the video by saying it was a special message for Arizona.
Alex Jones, who runs the website Infowars has really run with this, making a video (embedded below) claiming that Machete is a call to arms for Mexican Americans that will spark a race war and end up with the destruction of America as we know it! He even claims to have spoken to people working on the movie, who are afraid of the backlash against hispanics it might cause. Jones compares it to Nazi propaganda, seems to think a grindhouse movie can cause genocide and calls on Rodriguez not to release the film because otherwise he’ll have blood on his hands! While Jones’ comments may be more than a little extreme, he’s not the only one who saw the Machete trailer and decided Rodriguez might have gone too far with the film.
So what does Rodriguez say? Well, initially he said nothing, but it seems that with the fuss over the Cinco De Mayo trailer growing, he felt the need to have a word about things to AICN, to put the record straight, and it appears it’s all a joke that got out of hand. Rodriquez says, “I guess Ive gotten too adept at these fake trailers, some people thought it was real. We both knew Fox would have to remove anything we put up that very same day, yet I saw that even IMDB had it on their front page for several days as the OFFICIAL MACHETE TRAILER, as Im sure other sites did too. I probably should have added a note at the end of it saying IGNORE MR. TRAILER VOICE, this is NOT A REAL TRAILER to MACHETE.
So is it going to spark a race war? “It isnt,” says Rodriguez, “I would not put out a movie like that. Not only would that be irresponsible, itd be dull and un-entertaining. I simply wanted to make a special trailer that was as absurd as what was happening in Arizona. So I took some coincidentally timely lines of dialogue from the old original fake trailer from 3 years ago and from the new movie, reconfigured action beats, and cut it all out of context to make it look like the entire film was about Machete leading a revolt against anti-immigration politicians and border vigilantes. What can I say, it was Cinco de Mayo and I had too much tequila.
“Anyway, thats not what the movie is. In fact the main villain and Machetes nemesis is a Mexican drug lord from a powerful cartel (played by Steven Seagal) that kills Machetes family and runs him out of Mexico for being an honest cop, which is why Machetes forced to work as a day laborer in the US.”
So it seems we won’t be getting a race war from Machete, although if Arizonan politicians don’t calm down a bit, they may have a few more race relations problems than anything Robert Rodriguez could create.
Take a look below for both Alex Jones’ ranting about how Machete is the end of civilisation as we know it, as well as the ‘illegal’ trailer itself.