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The Siege (1998)

Rate: 7
Viewed: 6/24

Siege
6/24: You may think The Siege was there first, but in truth, Path to Paradise made the prediction of 9/11 a year earlier.

Yet The Siege does a good job of amplifying the terrorist threat. When I saw how the Arabs were being treated, I suddenly thought of what the United States did to approximately 120,000 Japanese people during WWII by interning them among ten concentration camps for four years.

Will the United States do it again? I believe so. And will the White House declare martial law anywhere in the United States? If it does happen, the country will be finished for good. Hence, the outcomes as shown in The Siege are unrealistic. Always reactionary, Denzel Washington's character won't matter in the grand scheme of things. The power struggle between the FBI and the military confused me because I didn't know what the correct answer was (it turns out that the MPs have the sole power and authority to arrest anyone in the military, but is it applicable during martial law?).

There's zero reason for Samir to reveal himself as the mastermind of the bombing attacks, giving the film an easy way out. What it should've done instead is letting the terrorists win because it's a domino effect and nobody can see what's going on since it's not in plain view due to language, culture, and territory issues. You may think what Denzel Washington did to save the people in the school building is absurd, but it's a correct move on his part because the helicopters were up there and he was thinking of "too much media exposure for that exact purpose and the bomb will be ready to blow."

Don't be fooled by the FBI, the CIA, and so on. They aren't that smart or ahead of the terrorists. That's why 9/11 happened. It's because the United States has always been a reactive country. There were no proactive security measures in place, so it had to take a life-changing event to get the country's attention. The only reason why terrorist attacks don't occur in the United States as often as in other countries is that it has the highest military expenditure in the world which is three times as much as the second-place country (China). The budget for the rest of the others are only a fraction of it. By the way, the United States has a long history of torturing important prisoners to extract information from them for security measures.

Back to the film, it's well-made. Denzel Washington and Annette Bening are fine. Bruce Willis looks a bit out of place. I thought for the longest time that Tony Shalhoub was Italian because I saw him so much on the TV show Wings, but he's actually Lebanese whose father immigrated to the United States from Zahlé, Lebanon, during WWI.

All in all, Path to Paradise was there first, and The Siege simply expanded the concept.