People in the (sadly) nearly empty theater where I first watched Bloody Sunday (2002) repeatedly buried their hands in their faces, flinched constantly, and twisted in their seats. One woman a few rows in front of me actually yelled out “No!” at one point, as if what she was seeing was actually happening, that Bernard “Barney” McGuigan, 41, waving a white handkerchief at the soldiers as he rushed to tend to a fallen friend, had been shot in the head, right then and there. Accompanying me that night was a first generation Irish-American from a town in Northern Ireland, whose family has direct ties to the IRA. This is a man I think of as a gentle giant—blessed with a heart of gold yet physically capable of tearing a man’s arms off. I brought him because the IRA and terrorism were frequent subjects of our many debates and I always favored the least violent solution, always deplored the tactics of the IRA, and had as much faith as I could muster in the power of negotiation and politics to deliver justice. At one point, in the midst of the almost hour-long riot/massacre depicted in the film, I looked over and saw he was gripping the seat in front of him, white-knuckled, aghast. When a downed civilian crawling through the mottled grass is shot again, I felt like grabbing the seat with him, ripping it out of the concrete floor and throwing it through the screen in a murderous rage.

This is the frightening power of Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which recreates the events that unfolded January 30, 1972 during a Civil Rights march in Derry (one of the westernmost cities of the occupied Northern Ireland and therefore often called Londonderry)—it becomes less a cinematic experience than a test of one’s self-control in the face of brutal carnage borne of injustice. Rendered almost hyper-realistic by handheld camera work, grainy 16mm stock, and featuring actual participants of the original march, this filmic reenactment becomes all the more sickening to witness. One hopes to take away from a film like this some sense that things have improved, that the world has learned from these horrific events and made corrections accordingly. Unfortunately, in these troubled times, this is not the case. With an almost total lack of sentimentality, the film is able to marry the tragedy of that fateful day with clear-eyed, complex, multifaceted humanity. Lending it even more urgency, its inspiration, Derry native Don Mullan’s book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, is frequently named as key impetus in the still ongoing Saville Inquiry, a reinvestigation of the events that took place on that day, over 30 years ago

Bloody Sunday comes off like a documentary filmed by actual participants carrying cameras as they march, fire, duck, run, and fall—all edited together in a minute-by-minute fashion that conveys the chaos of urban battle more effectively than Black Hawk Down, more realistically than The Battle of Algiers (a major reference point for Mr. Greengrass), and more viscerally than the WWII documentaries of John Huston and George Stevens. The immediacy of the film is ninety percent of its power; its lack of historical context is what makes it so harrowing. The central figure, emotional barometer, and primary mediator of the march is Ivan Cooper played by James Nesbitt. Mr. Cooper, a Protestant and Member of Parliament, was one of the major figures of the Sixties civil rights movement and a founding member of the nationalist SDLP (Social Democratic and Labor Party)—a political stance that led many of his own Protestant community to brand him a traitor. The stage for the day is set during the opening sequence with Greengrass intercutting stark white credits with statements read on TV and radio during the eve of the march by Mr. Cooper and Maj. General Ford (played by Tim Pigott-Smith):

Cooper: So we say this to the British Government: we will march peacefully this Sunday and march and march again until Unionist rule is ended in this province and a new system, based on civil rights for all is put in its place. Thank you.
Ford: Anyone either taking part in or organizing such an event is liable to immediate arrest. The law is the law and must be respected.

Like The Battle of Algiers, Bloody Sunday switches back and forth from multiple perspectives. The Para One Unit, responsible for most of the casualties, is shown to be composed of fierce soldiers: camouflage smeared faces, eager for action, milling around behind a wall that looms larger and larger as the march grows louder and nearer. They cannot see anything. They cannot see the crowds of men, women, and children holding hands and carrying peace banners. By the time the march is just beyond the wall, the peaceful mantra of “We Shall Overcome” has been drowned out by “hooligans” crying “Get out, you British bastards!” in response to the sight of armed soldiers and tanks.

The Occupation of Derry, and the 30-foot wall built to separate it from the fierce Irish natives surrounding it (commissioned in 1613 as a business venture structured not unlike the Dutch East India Company), was from its inception a formula for catastrophe. While these types of occupations and attendant fortifications occur throughout history, from the Middle East to Chechnya to the Great Wall of China, rarely do western audiences respond with such distress to the films depicting them—our lack of historical reference distances us from emotional impact. The events of Bloody Sunday, however, render the historical rationalizations either side made before or in its wake, whether Republican or Loyalist, politically moot. What remains is simply injustice, and the reflexes it engenders—which in this case led to a huge victory for the IRA and the despicable, decades-long terrorism that followed.

As the film makes clear from the beginning, the strategic idea was to draw out a certain minority element of rabble-rousers (or “yobbos,” as the British soldiers call them—a generic yet derogatory epithet comparable with “skinnies,” the term used to describe Somalis in Black Hawk Down) from the march and arrest them. In order to do this they intentionally closed off the street that leads to the original destination of the march, forcing the crowd to make a right turn directly in front of a barricade manned by hundreds of police and soldiers who eventually begin to hose them with dyed water and fire rubber bullets. By indicting a general populace (or country, for that matter) as evil, criminal, or otherwise obstinate, the military anticipates the outrage from the most volatile sects and plans their apprehension of these people. For the most part, these hooligans consisted of hot-headed, under-educated youths, usually with a connection to someone wronged or wounded or killed by the occupying force. These are the boys and girls who might even be leaders in the military or political world had they been born on the other side of the wall. One soldier complains to his fellow soldiers after the fact, “I saw you shooting civvies!” to which his companion replies: “Civvies? They were terrorists, mate.” Or do we refer to these casualties as collateral damage, the modern term for victims of civil unrest?

The line between terrorists and soldiers these days is an increasingly muddy one, especially when territorial occupation is added to the mix. One man’s pearl is another man’s paperweight. One people’s dignity is another people’s degradation. It’s clear that the protagonist in any conflict is definied by plutocracy—as the saying goes, “money doesn’t talk, it swears.” But films like this one, which place the viewer in the thick of things where chaos reigns and hair-trigger decisions can begin yet another cycle of generational vengeance, belie most of western culture’s convictions about Good and Evil. Indeed, they render them pointless.

It’s worth noting a statement Cooper makes to the press and more directly, to the British Government at the end of the day—disillusioned, exhausted, numb, yet clearly stolid about the consequences of the 27 wounded and 14 dead: “You’ve just destroyed the civil rights movement and given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have.” It is on this day where people who would have otherwise preferred to work towards peace through non-violence, received a terrible lesson in modern warfare—in a shoot first, ask questions later world, why let the enemy shoot first? Thirty years later, the participants are still sifting through the rubble. This is a promising development and an important lesson to learn from Bloody Sunday: the gun, whichever side uses it, is not going to decide the destiny of Ireland. The ethical dilemmas this film raises are profound and complex, especially in our Post 9/11, “with us or against us” world. In the end, though, the message is clear: violence begets violence, period.