Bloody Sunday (Widescreen)

I loved the cinematography in this movie. It gives the effect of actually being there. Also unusual was the fact that there is no music or score to this movie except for the closing credits. The director of this movie was going to take a lot of heat no matter which point of view he took. I thought that the movie perhaps made assumptions regarding the British troops which were a little unfair, but at the end of the day the overall story of the movie is 100% accurate - British troops shot 26 civilians, killing 13, while suffering no casualties themselves.

"Bloody Sunday" was one of the turning points of the modern Troubles. You only have to see the statistics to know that. In 1971, the year before the event, the death toll was under 200. In 1972, the year of the event, it was almost 500.

I'm going to criticize this movie for some of the things that others have praised it for. It could be called "Cops, Londonderry 1972." That's because the entire movie comes across as an episode of that show. The only difference is that we viewers see things that we never would with the real "Cops." This makes things appear to be extremely realistic, but at the same time bereft of any interpretation. There is no music to cue us about how we should feel. There is no foreshadowing of events. There are no speeches or sense of perspective about what happened in Londonderry.

There are also some other annoying things:

1. accents -- I have a pretty good ear for the Irish brogue, but I found myself scratching my head sometimes in utter confusion about what was being said.

2. no labelling of characters -- It would have helped immeasurably if there had been little credits popping up when each major character was introduced. I would have also provided times and locations when the scenes shifted

Three final notes:

1. Watching this movie leads me to the conclusion that Bloody Sunday was an avoidable tragedy. I think that I would assign about 80% of the blame to the British (putting young, aggressive soldiers armed with live ammunition into the situation they were in was absolute madness). Yet I can't help but think that some responsibility lies with the citizens of the Bogside who chose to riot and stone the soldiers.

2. I really do think that this movie might have been better and fairer if it had shown the killings in a Rashomon style. In other words, it would have been less biased to take at least some of the British soldiers at their word that they thought they saw or heard gunmen.

3. I agree with the other reviewer that Bloody Sunday has unfairly eclipsed other atrocities in Northern Ireland, many of them perpetrated by the IRA. It is a tragedy that no one was punished for what happened in Londonderry, but it is equally unjust that many of those responsible for mass killings like those in Birmingham (21 dead in two no-warning pub bombings in 1974) are walking free today as well.

Greengrass's excellent docudrama succeeds in drawing public attention to the events of 1972 Derry's "bloody Sunday." The verite form Greengrass employs yanks the viewer back in time and "in situ." He includes all sorts of tiny details that increase the realism. Other reviewers here rightly praise all this and I need add little else other than to agree. Criticism levelled at the film's format, however, argues against the emphasis on Mr. Cooper's perspective at the expense of those killed and maimed by the British soldiers; that this renders them "faceless;" and that, in an interrelated way, the disjunctive cuts exacerbate that trend, lending no coherency towards a final "build."

I disagree with this criticism. First, emphasizing Cooper's character provides a deeply embedded contextual thread to a necessarily fractured experience. In fact, the film does delve briefly into the lives of some of the victims. Second, the varied-length jump cuts and omnicient, jerky points of view create a strangely newsy, objective tone where the viewer recognizes the signs and experiences, yet simultaneously feels a sense of helplessness at the impending doom. This objective-subjective, fly-on-the-wall mosaic cuts across our common humanity in strange new ways. Finally, if the form used increasingly shorter and shorter cuts towards the climactic action sequences, the picture would appear too structured, too cleverly artistic, and lose its journalistic edge. The story emerges in its whole as a series of jumbled puzzle pieces, loosely strung in chronology and providing simultaneous viewpoints in a single day, even as the movie itself proceeds in time; its realism derives precisely from its seeming lack of structure. This device works so well that that the first time I saw the movie--having missed the very beginning--I thought I watched real footage and stared, absolutely riveted. The "facelessness," then, works, and works the point: that the only coherency necessary is that this tragedy really occurred in time and place and that it comprised many individual unknowable stories in an artistic representation of life.