Jessica Alba returns to the screen after a five-year hiatus with the thriller “Trigger Warning”. However, the film has sparked controversy and left many of her fans disappointed due to its unsavory undertones that border on racism.
A revenge thriller starring Alba, Netflix’s most recent original production, has angered fans to the point where some have threatened to abandon the service due to the film’s depiction of the slaughter of Arabs and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim clichés.
The movie opens with men wearing scarves firing at an aid vehicle bearing the name “American Relief Organization” as it passes across the Syrian desert. The guys are around the truck when gunmen wearing battle gear and brown keffiyeh scarves open fire on the “terrorists,” as the subtitles refer to them, killing some and warning others.
After the American characters overpower the Arab characters, one soldier begins firing at the tied-up hostages, prompting Alba’s character to intervene and stop him from “murdering assets.”
“After all the bombing, killing, and terrorizing that the US inflicts on the Middle East, you still have the audacity to feature Arabs as terrorists?!” wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter. “Shame on your racism!”
One social media post, liked over 65,000 times on X/Twitter, highlights a scene at the start of the film where a Special Forces team disguises themselves as humanitarian aid workers and come under fire from a group of Syrian militants. Sharing stills from the action sequence, including subtitles that read “[Terrorist in Arabic],” the X user wrote: “Boycott this racist ass movie that normalizes Americans hiding in aid trucks to shoot and murder Arabs. Does this sound familiar to anyone?”
Here is how the netizens reacted:
