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. Continue reading
