Team America: World Police


Team America: World Police is a 2004 American puppet comedy film directed by Trey Parker, who co-wrote it with Matt Stone and Pam Brady. Parker and Stone also star alongside Kristen Miller, Masasa Moyo, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche, Jeremy Shada, and Fred Tatasciore. A satire of action film archetypes, American militarism, and the foreign policy of the United States, the film follows the titular international counterterrorism force, which recruits a Broadway actor to assist in saving the world from Kim Jong Il and his coalition of Islamic terrorists and progressive Hollywood actors.
The film intertwines puppetry and miniature effects in a manner similar to Supermarionation, known for its use in the television series Thunderbirds, although Stone and Parker were not fans of that show. They worked on the script with Brady, a former South Park writer, for nearly two years. Production was troubled, with various technical problems regarding the puppets and the scheduling extremes of finishing in time for its theatrical release. It also came into routine conflict with the Motion Picture Association of America, which returned the film multiple times with an NC-17 rating due to an explicit sex scene involving puppets.
Team America: World Police premiered at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California on October 11, 2004, and was released in the United States on October 15, by Paramount Pictures. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed over $50 million worldwide on a $32 million budget.

Plot

Team America, an international organization dedicated to counterterrorism, defeats a group of Islamic terrorists in Paris, but are very reckless and destroy the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre in the process. The team includes Lisa, an idealistic psychologist; her love interest Carson; Sarah, a psychic; Joe, a jock who is in love with Sarah; and Chris, a martial arts expert who harbors a grudge towards actors. Carson proposes to Lisa, but a terrorist kills him in the middle of the act.
Team America leader Spottswoode brings Broadway actor Gary Johnston to Team America's base in Mount Rushmore and asks him to use his acting skills to infiltrate a terrorist cell. Unbeknownst to the team, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is supplying terrorists across the globe with WMDs. Gary infiltrates a terrorist group in Cairo. The team is discovered and a chase ensues, ending with Team America killing the terrorists. However, Cairo is left in ruins, drawing criticism and outrage from the Film Actors Guild, a union of progressive Hollywood actors led by Alec Baldwin.
At Mount Rushmore, Gary tells Lisa that as a child, his acting talent caused his older brother, Tommy, to be brutally killed by gorillas. While the two grow close and have sex, terrorists blow up the Panama Canal in retaliation for the Team America operation in Cairo, killing thousands. The F.A.G. blame this on Team America, while Kim chastises the terrorists for detonating one bomb too early. Gary, feeling his acting talents have again resulted in innocent people dying, resigns from Team America. The remaining members depart for the Middle East and North Africa, but are defeated and captured by North Korean forces while Michael Moore blows up Team America's base in a suicide attack. In North Korea, Kim invites the F.A.G. and world leaders to a peace ceremony, planning to detonate several bombs around the world while they are distracted.
Succumbing to depression, Gary is reminded of his responsibility by a rambling speech about "dicks, pussies and assholes" from a drunken tramp. Returning to the team's base, he finds Spottswoode has survived Moore's bombing. After regaining Spottswoode's trust by giving him a blowjob and undergoing one day of training, Gary goes to North Korea, where he uses his acting skills to infiltrate the base and free the team, although Lisa is held hostage by Kim. The team is confronted by the F.A.G. and kill most of their members in an ensuing fight. After Gary uses his acting skills to save Chris from Susan Sarandon, Chris confesses to Gary that the reason he dislikes actors is because he was raped by the cast of the musical Cats when he was 19 years old.
The team crashes the peace ceremony and Gary goes on stage to deliver a recontextualized version of the tramp's speech, arguing that "dicks", though criticized by "pussies", are necessary to stop "assholes", which convinces the world's leaders to unite. Kim betrays and kills Baldwin for being unable to counter Gary's argument, but he is kicked over a balcony by Lisa and impaled on a German delegate's Pickelhaube. Kim reveals his true form as an extraterrestrial cockroach and flees in a spaceship, vowing to return. Gary and Lisa happily begin a relationship and in the end, the team reunites, preparing to fight the world's terrorists once again.

Cast

The film also features a man dressed as a giant statue of Kim Il Sung, two black cats who pose as panthers, two nurse sharks, and a cockroach, with the difference in size with the marionettes played for humorous effect. A poster of the Barbi Twins was featured on the billboard in Times Square, making the Twins the only non-marionette humans in the film.

Production

Development

The film's origins involve Trey Parker and Matt Stone watching Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds on television while bored. Parker found that the series was unable to hold his interest as a child because "the dialogue was so expository and slow, and it took itself really seriously". The duo inquired about the rights to the series and found out that Universal Studios was doing a Thunderbirds film directed by Jonathan Frakes. "We said, 'What? Jonathan Frakes is directing puppets?' and then we found out it was a live-action version, and we were disappointed," said Parker.
News broke of the duo signing on to create the film on October 17, 2002, with Stone revealing that it would be a homage to Anderson. The news was confirmed in June 2003, with Variety quoting Stone as saying "What we wanted was to do a send-up of these super important huge action movies that Jerry Bruckheimer makes."
Before production began, Team America was championed at Paramount Pictures by Scott Rudin, who had been the executive producer for Parker and Stone's previous film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. After the "hassle" of producing the South Park film, Parker and Stone had vowed never to create another movie. Other studio executives were initially unenthusiastic about the project: the studio was in favor of the film's lack of political correctness, but were confused by the use of puppets. The executives explained that they could not make profit from an R-rated puppet feature, and Parker countered that similar things had been said about the South Park film, an R-rated animated musical which had become a box-office hit. Tom Freston, who was co-president of Viacom, Paramount's parent company, also supported the film, feeling that Paramount should make more lower-budget films that appeal to children and young adults after the studio's failures with adult-oriented films such as The Stepford Wives. According to Parker and Stone, executives were finally won over after they saw the dailies from the film's production.

Writing

Parker, Stone, and longtime writing partner Pam Brady spent nearly two years perfecting the Team America script. For influences, they studied scores of popular action and disaster films, such as Alien, Top Gun, and S.W.A.T. The duo watched Pearl Harbor to get the nuances of the puppets just right when they were staring at each other, and also used Ben Affleck as a model. To help shape the film's archetypal heroes, they read the books of Joseph Campbell. "On one level, it's a big send-up," Brady said. "But on another, it's about foreign policy". The first draft of the script was turned in well before the Iraq War. The film takes aim at various celebrities, many of whom came out in opposition to the Iraq War in 2003. Brady explained that the film's treatment of celebrities was derived from her annoyance at the screen time given to celebrities in the beginning of the Iraq War, in lieu of foreign policy experts.

Filming

The film's central concept was easier to conceive than to execute. Team America was produced using a crew of about 200 people, which sometimes required four people at a time to manipulate a marionette. The duo were forced to constantly rewrite the film during production due to the limited nature of the puppets. The 270 puppet characters were created by the Chiodo Brothers, who previously designed puppets for films such as Elf and Dinosaur. The costumers of the crew were responsible for making sure the over 1,000 costumes remained in cohesive order and were realistic.
Production began on May 23, 2004. The project was interrupted multiple times early on in production. As soon as filming began, Parker and Stone labored to find the right comic tone; the original script for the film contained many more jokes. After shooting the very first scene, the two realized the jokes were not working, and that the humor instead came from the marionettes. "Puppets doing jokes is not funny," Stone found. "But when you see puppets doing melodrama, spitting up blood and talking about how they were raped as children, that's funny." Filming was done by three units shooting different parts at the same time. Occasionally, the producers had up to five cameras set up to capture the scene. The film was mainly based on the 1982 cult classic action film Megaforce, of which Parker and Stone had been fans. Many ideas had been copied such as the flying motorcycle sequence.
The film was painstakingly made realistic, which led to various shots being re-done throughout the process due to Parker and Stone's obsession with detail and craftsmanship. For example, a tiny Uzi cost $1,000 to construct, and Kim Jong Il's eyeglasses were made with hand-ground prescription lenses. Although the filmmakers hired three dozen marionette operators, simple performances from the marionettes were nearly impossible; a simple shot such as a character drinking might take a half-day to complete successfully. Parker and Stone agreed during production of Team America that it was "the hardest thing ever done."
Rather than rely on computer-generated special effects added in post-production, the filmmakers vied to capture every stunt live on film. Parker likened each shot to a complicated math problem. The late September 2004 deadline for the film's completion took a toll on both filmmakers, as did various difficulties in working with puppets, with Stone, who described the film as "the worst time of life," resorting to coffee to work 20-hour days, and sleeping pills to go to bed. The film was barely completed in time for its October 15 release date. At a press junket in Los Angeles on October 5, journalists were only shown a 20-minute reel of highlights because there was no finished print. Many of the film's producers had not seen the entire film with the sound mix until the premiere.