Nobody who was at Ground Zero in Manhattan, or saw the horror unfolding on live television, can ever forget what happened on September 11, 2001. And in 2015, we saw sizable terror attacks of a decidedly different nature take place some ten thousand miles apart, first in three simultaneous attacks in Paris, and then on a rehabilitation center in San Bernardino, California, just sixty miles east of Los Angeles.
But a film released slightly less than three years before the horror of 9/11 may have foreseen the problems we have had to face since then in dealing with terrorism, both militarily and morally. That film was THE SIEGE, released in the fall of 1998.
Co-written and directed by Edward Zwick, whose films include the 1989 Civil War epic GLORY, the 1996 Gulf War film COURAGE UNDER FIRE, and the very chilling 1983 TV film SPECIAL BULLETIN, THE SIEGE depicts the various terrorist attacks leveled upon the Big Apple after the CIA abducts a fundamentalist religious leader (Ahmed Ben Larby). The attackers are followers of this radical Islamist sheik, and unfortunately their tactics have the hallmarks of the CIA all over them, something that becomes all too clear when FBI counter-terrorism agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) meets up with CIA agent Elsie Kraft, nee Sharon Bridger (Annette Benning), and they try, without a whole lot of success, to catch the perpetrators. But there is much worse to come; as the attacks keep happening, the United States military, under the command of the staunch general William Deveraux (Bruce Willis), takes charge and hunts down virtually anyone in NYC who just might look like a terrorist (i.e., anyone of Arab/Islamic extraction), even if that happens to include Washington's FBI partner (Tony Shaloub). Even though Willis implores the Congress at the start of the onslaught not to use the Army as a police force, when push comes to shove, that's what he does on his own
and, much to Washington's own personal horror, becomes nothing if not Napoleonic in the worst sense of the word in threatening to kill and torture anyone he personally thinks is a terrorist. Thus, the siege of THE SIEGE isn't the terrorist attacks themselves, but the conflict between Willis and Washington, something made manifestly clear near the end as Willis is about to torture a suspect (Amro Salama), and Washington tells him in no uncertain terms: "If we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won!" THE SIEGE was, at its time, a fairly controversial film, less for its depiction of terrorism and violence than for what many Americans of Muslim and Arabic origin saw as perpetrating a dangerous stereotype of them, a stereotype that they had every right to rail against then, and do even more so in the wake of Paris and San Bernardino. That being said, however, the film does show what history should have told us: that overseas covert or military actions carried out years or decades in the past can result in the kind of nightmarish blowback seen here on screen, or for real in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on 9/11. And when martial law is declared in what we like to call our Land of the Free, as happens in this film, then terror can win out, as it almost does even after the attacks themselves stop.
Zwick gets plenty of action and tension out of the situation in THE SIEGE, less of a Schwarzenneger free-for-all or even a DIE HARD-type thing (Willis' presence aside) than something more akin to the 1977 John Frankenheimer classic BLACK Sunday; and Washington's Everyman-type FBI agent and Willis' hard-assed general are perfect antagonists. THE SIEGE might have been seen as an 'R'-rated popcorn flick in 1998, but now it is something a bit more in light of the last decade and a half of events, both national and international.
