Review – Bloody Sunday

My hat’s off to the folks who put this together if for no other reason than this is the only time in recent memory that anyone’s managed to do the whole Peter Watkins fake-documentary-recreation-of-historical-event and actually pull it off. And goodness knows they aren’t the only ones who’ve tried. I can’t accurately describe this as an entertaining movie, because the subject matter is too damn depressing and the recreation of the events surrounding the Bloody Sunday Massacre is too vivid to make this any fun to watch. I suppose that pro-English critics might point out that this is an Irish production and thus may not exactly do justice to the British paratroopers who shot unarmed marchers. Of course, that might raise the question about what exactly would be justice for the paras. I found it helpful to turn on the captions, inasmuch as the accents, frequently heavily laced with slang, are sometimes difficult to understand. I also thought including all of an extended live performance of U2’s song about the massacre at the end of the movie (which required keeping a black screen up even after the credits finished rolling) was sort of excessive. Otherwise this is an outstanding film. Worth seeing