Bloody Sunday and United 93.

Same Director, same basic style, same chillingly sad outcome and yet one turns out to be a Cinematic masterpiece of the highest order and the other a valiant but ultimately hollow depiction of one fateful day in history.

But why was Bloody Sunday so good and United 93 so bland?

I'd toyed with the answer for a while before it actually hit me. United 93 was nothing more then an extended episode of the BBC series "Day's That Shook the World" i.e. a fateful but ultimately soulless exercise in historical retrospect. It told the events but somewhere along the line forgot the heart.

Bloody Sunday forgets none of these things, its chilling, visceral wholly accurate (something United 93 has serious trouble with althou thats not completely its own fault) and contains real people, real characters not cardboard cutouts who only hold on to the ability to move the soul because of the freshness of the event it depicts.

Bloody Sunday blends the harsh grit of reality with the moving ability of the cinematic medium, everything from the nervous trigger happy yet entirely human British soldiers trust into a struggle they know little about to Nesbitt's Oscar worthy turn (yes im totally serious) as the idealistic civil rights campaigner caught desperately trying to contain the spiraling chaos that gripped the town of Derry that day gives this film untold depth.

Its not an easy film to watch, it brings up feelings of anger and sadness in equal measure but its a film which simply has to be seen to realize what United 93 missed.

Perhaps it was the chasm of time (30 years between the event and the film) that allowed Bloody Sunday to be made the way it was, perhaps in another 25 years another version of United 93 will hit the mark far more effectively then its current incarnation.

Unanswerable questions, but one is certain Bloody Sunday is quite simply one of the best films made this millennium and its a belief that I'll probably never lose.

A+

Bloody Sunday is a well executed on every technical level. It is also rather emotional. It managed to really take hold of me in the last 30 or so minutes. I was saddened and confounded by the events that took place during the rally, and after. James Nesbitt does a fantastic job playing the orchestrator of what he was hoping would be a non violent march for civil rights. At the end when they ask the question of what he would say to the young boys and men who would join the IRA because of this incident, his reply "I would be ill equipped to preach to them now" (paraphrase... probably) quite broke my heart and showed how huge an impact the crimes of that day had on him. I was so caught up in the movie near the end, even feeling disappointed in and sad for the one soldier they focused on who was questioning what had happened that day, only to drop in line with the rest of them and tell a side of the story you could tell he did not believe.

My only complaint was that while my eyes were trying to pop themselves out of their sockets at the end I had to READ! And the text wasnt that all easy to read, either!!


****