Battle in Seattle is a 2007 political action-thriller film written and directed by Stuart Townsend, in his directorial debut.

The movie takes an in-depth look at several fictional characters during those five days in 1999 as demonstrators protested the meeting of the WTO in Seattle's streets.

The movie portrays conflicts between the peaceful protesters and people committing property destruction whose actions were widely covered by the media.

Although the protest began peacefully with a goal of stopping the WTO talks, police began teargassing the crowd after it refused to clear the streets and the situation escalated into a full-scale riot and a State of Emergency that pitted protesters against the Seattle Police Department and the Washington National Guard.

In 2002, Townsend became interested in making a film about the 1999 WTO protests when he read Anita Roddick' s Take It Personally, a book about globalization that contained an essay about the event.

[6] For research, Townsend read a number of books related to the event, including No Logo by Naomi Klein, Noreena Hertz's Silent Takeover, Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization, Joeseph Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work, and Alexander Cockburn's Five Days that Shook the World.

[5] Early on, Susan Sarandon was rumored to be cast as a reporter who sympathizes with the demonstrators and comes into conflict with her editor, but she was unable to take part in the production.

[6][2] Michelle Rodriguez, Jennifer Carpenter, Channing Tatum and Tzi Ma were announced to have joined the cast in November 2006.

[8][9] While some activists, such as David Solnit and Rice Baker Yeboah, who appeared in the This Is What Democracy Looks Like documentary, were wary of a film being made about the events from the perspective of the perceived mainstream media, other activists who participated in the protests assisted during filming by providing details for accuracy.

The site's critics consensus reads, "Well intentioned and passionate, this docu-drama about the 1999 WTO protests is heavier on politics than character development".

[18] According to Owen Gleiberman of EW.com, the film "sounds like a bad TV movie: a drama based on the protests that halted the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.

[19] In the Associated Press, Kirk Honeycutt wrote, "While it makes no bones about where its sympathies lie, these fictional stories show a genuine fascination with the role politics plays on both sides of such confrontations and how things can spin out of control with no single person to blame.

[21][22] Dennis Harvey of Variety felt "the human dramas imposed on nonfiction backdrop occasionally feel contrived", and some stories "convert from apolitically crass to conscientious a little too fast, notably Channing Tatum’s knucklehead cop and Connie Nielsen’s TV reporter", but the film's ambition and performances make up for its unevenness.

David Solnit, who felt the film was a sanitized, Hollywood-style version of the story, set up a website and co-wrote a book purporting to provide his own account of the protests.

", the collective allege that the protests were characterized in the film as an isolated spontaneous uprising in which a "small fringe group" of black bloc anarchists "stole the show", whereas CrimethInc.

[25] A review published by Anarkismo praised the film as "clearly well-researched", citing the pacing and general narrative as quite accurate, but criticized the presentation of anarchist politics as one-dimensional and a caricature.