Pete Travis, 2008
“What are you seeing?”
- Juarez (Saïd Thagmaoui)
So, first: any comparisons to Kurosawa’s masterful truth-fuck Rashomon (and, lord, have there been some) are a lil simplistic, this fairly straight-up quasi-Greengrass-Bourne utilising its perspective multiverse as more of a logistical tactic rather than an investigative method; it being fairly fucking far from an investigation into any multiple truths.
Beginning with the narrative’s most objective (and least succesfully rendered) perspective - the hilariously monikered “GNN” news team’s coverage of the central event† – writer/non-reggae legend Barry Levy stakes out his tale’s turf: the repeatedly-examined details of said event (namely: the attempted assassination of a visiting US president). Told in a kind of mini-real-time, Levy’s success here is in his understanding of scope, the oft-revisited helicopter-flying-overhead images here the visual metaphor to his narrative thrust: that the subjective details of any large event can only be interpreted collectively; it being a rather more authentic (again, Bourne) telling than, say, the otherwise wonderful David Koepp-scripted War Of The Worlds, with that film’s reliance on Tom Cruise’s somewhat magical ubiquity rendering some of its turns a lil convenient.
However, with each subsequent “vantage point” – among them the president’s bodyguard, a camera-wielding tourist, the US president himself and, save a cute little girl, a worrying array of terroristic foreigners - brick-by-bricking the details, the film is respectively less and less interested in truths, its hammered points and revelations taking the form and content of a marginally redrawn 24; its “1 TRUTH” seemingly that shit happens to the US and its governmental employees.
† featuring Sigourney Weaver’s news producer, the slowest speaking media employee ever depicted on film!
