Jim Caviezel's character, Carroll Oerstadt, seemed to mirror in several ways the story of Timothy McVeigh, a domestic terrorist who destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a bomb in 1995. Caviezel and Scott did not deny this, and both admitted that the Oerstadt character was at least partly based on McVeigh. Ross Johnson of "The New York Times" also compared the ferry bombing at the film's beginning to the Oklahoma City bombing.