THE SIEGE directed by Edward Zwick (1998).
"Who the fuck is supposed to be in charge here anyway?"
One of the most common reactions to 9/11 was that the events looked like they could have been staged by Hollywood.
One of the movies people may have had in mind was The Siege which was made in 1998 and anticipated the horror that was to strike NYC with scary accuracy.
This otherwise godawful film is proof of what Mike Davies wrote in his collection of essays, ‘Dead Cities And Other Tales’: “It is important to recall the already fraught collective condition before Real Terror arrived in a fleet of hijacked airliners. [The 1990s] was an age of inexplicable anxiety”.
Those terrible events of 2001 did not come out of a clear blue sky.
Arabs and Muslims were understandably enraged by being portrayed on-screen as terrorist monsters, calling Zwick’s movie “beyond offensive”. But Americans themselves are not portrayed in a particularly flattering light either. What begins as a standard thriller with the FBI on the trail of the ‘enemy within’ turns in to a dystopian nightmare in which the nation’s leaders and their appointed protectors have as much the dignity and organisation as a brood of headless chickens.
The opening documentary shots remind us that the buck stopped with Bill Clinton at the time but he is curiously absent thereafter even at a high level meetings to declare military rule. It is left to a spokesman to reassure us the “President is prepared to be presidential”. This gives a window to Bruce Willis to step in as Army Major General William Devereaux and the power goes to his head turning him from a pompous asshole into an unhinged megalomaniac.
It is left to Denzil Washington as FBI special agent Anthony “Hub” Hubbard to save the day assisted by Arabic FBI man Frank Haddad (Tony Shalhoub) and maverick CIA agent Elise/Sharon (Anette Bening) .
‘Hub’ makes plenty of rousing speeches reminding anyone within earshot that the US constitution still means something. At one point he rants at Willis about his maltreatment o a prisoner: “Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they’ve won. They’ve already won!” Most of the time he might as well be pissing in the wind but, this being Hollywood, ultimate disaster is averted in the nick of time.
It is claimed that after the Twin Towers fell, The Siege was one of the most requested movies at the rental stores. Talk about rubbing salt into an open wound!
