Anti-Fracking Movie Starring Matt Damon Bankrolled in Part by OPEC-Member United Arab Emirates

A new drama starring Matt Damon as a smooth-talking natural gas company official who attempts to purchase drilling rights from local residents in a rural Pennsylvania town is already generating buzz, but it has nothing to do with what takes place on-screen.

The movie Promised Land supposedly dramatizes the dangers involved in the drilling process known as hydrofracking- a local environmentalist seeks to thwart Damon and his company's attempts to drill in the area. To hardly any one's surprise, the local schoolteacher and environmentalist who raises the alarm regarding hydrofracking is portrayed in a positive manner while I suspect Damon's gas company official will be portrayed as manipulative and unethical- at least until his change of heart where he falls in love with a local woman.

Pretty standard Hollywood 'We-Liberals-and-Environmentalists-know-whats-best-for-you-rubes-in-flyover-country' boilerplate so far, right? With its December release, there's even Oscar talk for Promised Land all while bringing the ongoing debate over fracking front and center.

Only it was recently discovered that the film has received considerable financial backing from the United Arab Emirates- a member of OPEC and among the top 10 oil producing nations in the world.

The film was produced “in association with” Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media, as first reported by the Heritage Foundation. Abu Dhabi Media is wholly owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, a small but extremely wealthy federation of absolute monarchies along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf.

Very obviously, the UAE has an interest in slowing down the expansion of hydraulic fracking that has created an energy boom in the United States.

This would not be the first American film that would've received financial backing from Image Media Abu Dubai- other titles include The Help, Contagion and The Crazies among others.

Locations for filming Promised Land include the city of Pittsburgh as well as Westmoreland and Armstrong counties in Western Pennsylvania. A group of Armstrong county residents, upset at what they claim were the filmmakers using false pretenses to film in the area, started up a Facebook page called Armstrong County Promised Land Pride. Visitors to the page are greeted with the following succinct message: "They filmed this movie in our backyard. They said it would be fair to drilling. It's not. We're pissed."

Fracking opponents claim that the process injects massive quantities of hazardous chemicals into the groundwater and that hydrofracking can cause tap water to burst into flame and caused last year's magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Mineral, VA that was felt up and down the East Coast- even though the nearest natural gas well was hundreds of miles away.

The movie is loosely based on events in Dimock, PA where a handful of local residents had claimed drilling from nearby wells had contaminated their groundwater. However, after analysis by Pennsylvania's environmental agency and the EPA, the water was deemed safe to drink by the EPA this summer.

The real-life events in Dimock have reportedly prompted a hasty re-write of the Promised Land script. Of course this is where Hollywood decided to double down on the stupid in typical Hollywood fashion.

according to sources close to the movie, they’ve come up with a solution — suggest that anti-fracking fraudsters are really secret agents employed by the fossil-fuel industry to discredit the environmental movement.

In the revised script, Damon exposes Krasinski as a fraud — only to realize that Krasinski’s character is working deep undercover for the oil industry to smear fracking opponents.

Hollywood is worried about declining theater audiences; it’s blaming the Internet and the recession. But the real problem might be closer to home.

Damon and Krasinski said they were making a movie that “defines us as a country” but then shoehorned ideology into a script — and when real-world events became a problem, they shoehorned in more ideology.

You see, instead of the noble well-intentioned environmentalist perhaps having some kind of a 'Mea Culpa' moment and the dire environmental consequences Kasinski's charachter warned about not taking place, in west coast liberal screenwriter-land, the anti-fracking advocates being wrong are purely the fault of the oil company who are disseminating misinformation to discredit opponents.

Instead of some ancillary plot where the cash-strapped townsfolk can now afford to save up for their kids' college education or put an elderly relative in a decent rest home- all while drinking and bathing with tapwater that doesn't burst into flames- the alarmist and false narrative spun by the environmentalists and celebrity anti-frackers has to be placed at the feet of the energy companies. I believe that is called 'chutzpah' in some parts of the world.