Surprised! A good film is like a good research. It not only raises questions and is thought-provoking, but it also stands the test of time.
Standing at the time point of January 11, 2021, look back at this movie released in 1998. The increasingly turbulent world situation in the past 23 years has made the thought-provoking questions in the story even more profound.
For example, the issue of terrorist attacks in the United States and the war on terrorism. I believe many people will lament that the hijacking of a passenger plane and hitting the Pentagon in the 9-11 terrorist attack is highly similar to the story of the bomb truck hitting the FBI building in the movie. But I would like to add that the main target of the US anti-terrorism war in recent years is al-Qaeda. Its predecessor was the Mujahideen training camp set up by bin Laden with the support of the United States in 1986. From the early 1980s to 1986, the United States gave these "jihadists" a lot of aid! These include the US Central Intelligence Agency's annual military spending of US$500 million to arm and train poor and unarmed guerrillas. Many cutting-edge products of American high-tech weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, have successively entered bin Laden's arsenal. Bin Laden said that his life goal is to use violence to drive all Americans out of the Islamic world.
Another example is the issue of Islamic ethnicity in European and American countries. The murder of French teachers by cutting their throats in 2020 and their subsequent incidents are the recent focus of the situation. In fact, in recent years, the political situation in Europe and the United States has clearly turned to the right, and nationalist sentiments have prevailed. Anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and resistance to minorities have become the mainstream of society. Forced by the situation, countries began to examine the pros and cons of the process of globalization, and gradually adopted a closed and conservative strategy. Some people say that the first three decades of the 21st century will be thirty years of anti-globalization. From the beginning of the refugee crisis, the rise of the Islamic State, the British referendum to leave the European Union, and the rapid rise of right-wing parties in Europe, if Trump, who upholds "nativism," is elected, it can probably be seen as a trend-the world has gradually begun to enter a "rebellion". The reversal period of "globalization". I have to admire it, this movie keenly showed it in 1998.
All these unsolvable problems will end in conflicts between people, and even between everyone and themselves. A polite, sensitive, fragile, but at the same time crazy and brutal young generation of educated Muslim youths, female CIA agents struggling between trust and doubt, cooperation and betrayal, FBI employees who think they can integrate into the mainstream of the United States but can’t even keep their sons ,... Although the movie can barely give the story a fairly satisfactory ending, these characters in the real world may only be struggling in the long river of life and history.
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