Director: Paul Greengrass
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 2.0
British filmmaker Greengrass shows the attack by Anders Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) in Norway on July 22, 2011 - in which he set off a bomb in Oslo and then took a ferry to the island of Utøya where he shot and killed members of the Workers' Youth League ... and the consequences of his actions. One of the major themes of Greengrass' oeuvre is his interest in various forms of terrorism (plane hijacking in United 93, pirates in Captain Phillips) and Breivik's ethno-nationalist/fascist beliefs place him in that group, but the way the movie is structured is way off: it begins with the attack, and then becomes this mopey hospital-and-courtroom drama in which one of the survivors, Viljar (Jonas Strand Gravli), must undergo many operations and physical therapy to try to recover (there were unremovable fragments of Breivik's bullets in his brain; he lost use of his one arm and right eye). Putting the movie together this way negates a lot of tension and no choked-up speech directed at Breivik will ever make him change his mind, making one wonder whether or not Norway's use of "restorative justice" (as opposed to "punitive justice") will help him "heal" (I doubt this, and it's not something the movie thinks about). "You lost," Breivik's attorney Geir Lippestad (Jon Øigarden) tells him ... but it doesn't feel like anyone "won."
