Well, (almost) three months have gone by since the Boston Marathon bombing and that’s apparently a respectable enough period of time for Hollywood to sit back before getting their fangs into this one. Right? Well, whether it is or isn’t, this was bound to happen sooner or later. So yes, a movie about the terrifying event is on the way because cinema seems to be where America likes to heal its wounds.
Deadline reports that the pens behind David O. Russell‘s “The Fighter” — Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson – have snapped up the rights to a yet-to-be-published book by Casey Sherman and Boston Herald reporter Dave Wedge about the bombing, and the subsequent manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers responsible for the crime. This will be a reunion of creatives of sorts as Tamasy and Johnson have previously penned an adaptation of Sherman’s book “The Finest Hour,” a rescue story about two oil tankers that crashed in 1952, that has Robert Schwentke attached to direct.
Obviously, this stuff is inherently dramatic and it’s easy to see why anyone would want to make a movie about the Boston bombing, but as 9/11 proved, tragic real history doesn’t necessarily translate into great filmmaking (one could argue Spike Lee‘s “25th Hour” is the best post-9/11 movie and it’s not even directly about the event). So all we’ll say is proceed with caution guys. But hey, the eventual movie can’t be any worse than the actual reporting that went on around the event….
As long as Paul Greengrass's staggering "United 93" exists, I find it impossible to argue that any other film comes close to it as the greatest film to tackle the 9/11 attacks. (As good a film as "25th Hour" is…)
Greengrass had the nerve to approach the story directly, a seemingly impossible task, and yet managed to make a film that's even-handed, not sentimentalized, not exploitative, not glamorized, and profoundly gripping and moving.
It also manages to say a HUGE amount about the topic despite its intentionally limited scope. The image of the hands of the terrorists and the passengers on the controls of the plane as it goes into the ground is one of the most unbearable yet honest and insightful depictions of the post-9/11 era.
In his commentary, he describes how the people on that plane were the whole world in microcosm, because they were the first to enter the "post-9/11 world" by understanding what was happening, and they were the first to have to make the impossible choices about how to react. His film offers no answers, only questions. It's colossally brilliant.
I know it's cool to shout "too soon", but there's always the chance the result will be a lasting work of art like this.
Can we not give these psychopaths any more publicity, even bad publicity? I will never understand Hollywood's perverse need to represent trauma so soon after the trauma itself. Or, no, I understand it – it's a cash grab, it's a studio fishing for awards, its about getting attention, etc. But if these people really wanted to pay respect, they would leave this subject alone.