Blatant propaganda film: British = Bad! Irish Catholic = Good!

Rating: 2/10 (25 April 2003)

There is enough audience manipulation and fudging of the facts here to make Oliver Stone proud. Didactic movies such as this are annoying, no matter how good the director's technical skill, because they talk down to you and tell you what you ought to believe, based on a conveniently selected subset of the facts. For instance, what were the IRA doing that day in this supposed IRA stronghold? We are not told. It is certainly legitimate for the director to question the official British version of events, but he fails to apply the same skeptical standards to the other side.
While this docu-drama fails as a documentary, does it at least work as a drama? Yes and no. One the one hand, I found the hand-held "war correspondent" camerawork to be very effective. In addition, the director was able to elicit wonderfully naturalistic performances from his actors. But there are narrative failures. Strangely, the motivations of the British paratroopers to kill are not explored at all. One minute they are there with a disciplined plan to break up the march and arrest activists, and the next they are shown running amuck like crazed psychopaths shooting people execution-style. The film initially takes great pains to show the professionalism of the British troops as they organize, and then portrays them as behaving completely unprofessionally in the field. My guess is that this incongruity is a result of the director having left out some inconvenient facts that would weaken the anti-British moral judgement he is pushing. It's tough to maintain a consistent story line when you are so busy coming up with speculative embellishments and stripping out what you don't want the audience to know.