Patriots Day
Patriots day is the latest culimination in Peter Berg’s seminal
duplex of his modern American tragedy saga. Both last years Deepwater Horizon and now this sister film,
both manage to craft with haunting unison, a concotion of imagery only the
likes of really good cinema can make visceral and palpable.
With
Deepwater Horizon Berg manages to
make what is both a nail-biting edge of your seat traditional Hollywood
blockbuster segued with a intimate emotional drama of the fragility of human
lives when faced with the awesome power of corporate machinisation and brutal
force. Berg having managed to successfully navitage the treachous waters of what
could easily have been smarmy american tokenism and for-the-sake-of-it
Hollywoodism, managed to produce a film full of optimism, triumph over
adversity and the power of endurance and working together out of the ashes of a
repugnent (could easily have been prevented) man made disaster- sympotmatic of
our greed above all age.
In
addition to that most welcome of modern american story-telling, Berg goes one
further with Patriots Day. With this
film, we follow a especially on form albeit archetyal Mark Wahlberg as he
experiences the events of April the 15th 2013 when terrorism erupted
onto the streets of Boston. Once again, this could have easily have been
another stereotypical quintessential american piece of propaganda tokenism,
full of cliché. Thankfully it is the complete opposite.
Berg
puts the viewer right into the heart of the events, like for which, for my
money no other modern film on terrorism has managed to do thus far. Even though
we know full well what happened, this is such masterful film-making that you
are transported into the taste and feel of the action like you were subject to
the horrors yourself. This film is like a punch in the guts, waking us up from
our apathetic slumber of who cares and changing channel.
We
follow an unconventinal narrative by not only simultaneously following the lives
of the victims and authorities involved, but also seeing behind the scenes from
the perspective of the perpetrators themselves. This unique creative decision,
allows the audience to develop a intricate psychological map of emotion, that
builds and adds enormous grativas the heat of the action when it arrives.
Patriots Day is the finest examination of a modern story-teller
encapsulating the zeitgeist and yet not falling victim to the more generic and
darker conclusions, instead illustrating that in such moments of darkness, it
is the light that burns the brightest, this is ulimately a film of hope and
love, which is presented in such an unbias, opposite of im-sick-to-my-stomach American
patriorism ( despite what the title suggests) that only if are completely void
of any empathy can you not be overwhelmed by.
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