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“And the battle’s just begun/There’s many lost, but tell
me who has won…”—Sunday Bloody Sunday
I can’t stand U2. Never have, never will. But I would
in no way argue that their 1990 hit “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
wasn’t a masterpiece. It combines the rage of wronged countrymen
with the regret of failed revolutionaries, creating not so
much a song as a hymn of memorial. It embodies the loss suffered
on that Sunday in 1972 with the emotion and weight it deserves.
The same can be said for Bloody Sunday, an amazing
new film that recreates January 30, 1972, in Derry, Northern
Ireland. Directed and written by Greengrass with an
incredibly assured perspective and shot ultra-realistically
with handheld cameras, Bloody Sunday doesn’t just reenact
that day; it relives it. Greengrass’s screenplay feels completely
improvised, helped along by a group of incredible actors who
fill the screen and speak the words as naturally as I’ve ever
seen in a film. Every single moment feels unfailingly authentic;
Greengrass takes no easy ways out, never gives in to sappiness
where a more crowd-pleasing director might. The staging of
events eventually achieves a dreadful inevitability, and you
feel like you’re right alongside the characters as their world
is torn out from under them and they struggle to deal in a
rapidly collapsing environment where the moment is the moment
and you may not get another.
If you don’t know the story surrounding Bloody Sunday, it
goes thus: Ivan Cooper (Nesbitt), an Irish member of
Parliament, has organized a peaceful march to protest Britain’s
policy of imprisoning suspected criminals without a proper
trial. What’s at stake, though, is far bigger than such a
specific cause: If they don’t do this, then the British will
have the freedom to stomp all over their civil rights, in
effect creating what could best be called an imperialistic
tyranny. During their march, British troops mobilize for crowd
control, and, in a moment staged in the film as basically
the beginning of chaos and the end of God, open fire on the
Irish marchers, eventually killing 13 and wounding 14 others.
Being interviewed after the massacre, the soldiers maintain
that the marchers, many of whom they claimed were IRA members,
shot at them first and planned on using nail bombs against
them (in a chilling scene, British troops plant some of these
bombs on one of the marchers, who lies dead in the back seat
of a car).
It’s an amazing story, illustrating the irrationality of
conflict and the tragedy of being unprepared for the worst.
Cooper cites the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Gandhi, but what he doesn’t realize is that, unlike them,
he doesn’t have the control he thinks he does. Minutes build
up, signaling what’s to come, but no one sees it until it’s
too late. The cuts in the film are jarring, simply fading
to black for a second between scenes and jump-cutting within
scenes. This choppiness serves the film well, because it emphasizes
the segmentation of time leading up to what’s in store, how
each moment is part of the chain of events that will end when
peace is no longer enough. When this happens, when all the
tension and the frustration come to a head in the film’s second
hour, one thing remains in the air: the injustice of having
to die for what you believe in, instead of just being able
to believe. Bloody Sunday doesn’t see martyrdom as
much of an honor in this case. It just wishes it didn’t have
to come to that.
—Cole Sowell
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
