The Siege
What an incredible time capsule, how topical after 25 years of the real largest terrorist attack in America since Timothy McVeigh. And yet, it’s very by the book.
Of course it’s the FBI versus the CIA in American soil, the spooks are vanquished by Hoover’s goons. It does the thing where real Clinton footage is used, but he is never directly mentioned, this is not a political thriller.
The cold opening is something. Bin Laden just bombed some Saudi barracks, killing hundreds of American soldiers (IRL in Beirut by Hezbollah, this is the inflection point), but in this alternate universe, the CIA are tracking him and kidnap him in Lebanon, as he travels somewhere in a Mercedes.
This is the trigger for his independent terrorist cells in New York. They put an ink bomb on a bus, then a real bomb in a real bus, then in a theatre, then try and fail to blow up a school. The next target is the feds’ own HQ (how embarrassing), but the good guys get the final cell by the end, it’s the CIA double agent.
The CIA trained the terrorists to destabilise Saddam’s regime, making bombs and shit, then they were abandoned, so they turned their sights on the US. This is textbook blowback. Yes, this is not a political thriller, it’s a paranoid thriller where 9/11 was an inside job!
There’s this general who kidnapped Bon Laden and his holding him illegally, to trigger the virulent response that Bin Laden wants: Islamophobia, martial law in New York City, suspension of civil rights.
The terrorists win, America is not some banana republic, they have laws! He is defeated by a fed, but there’s also a big demonstration of kumbaya, a massive plot hole since martial law is still in effect.
This being before the war on terror, they up the ante by going full ICE, rounding up people in the streets, going house to house, with concentration camps Muslims in stadiums, like the Japanese in WW2 (this is explicitly mentioned).
Our fed chief is hyper competent and all, but he is being gaslit by the spooks. The main spook is sleeping with her asset, as a kind of guilt trip over abandoning him in Iraq. She was running the covert counterpart of Operation Desert Storm (of “this aggression will not stand” fame), but abandoned the Lebanese-Palestinian dude in Iraq (not Kurd), so she helps them flee to America.
It’s better than Body of Lies, and much better than The Peacemaker. It’s somewhat grounded in reality, not Red Dawn.
This is such a coincidence, I just hearing about the climax. Remember when Obama murdered an American teenager in Yemen, but he wasn’t even bombing America, his dad was working for the CIA (ISIS section). Obama made a point of supervising things personally, he can’t complain about being an arms-length program.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.