Someone once said that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes, they can be eerily similar, at least in some aspects.

"What if what they really want is for us to herd children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law. Shred the constitution just a little bit. Because if we torture him, general, we do that. And everything that we have bled, and fought, and died for is over, and they've won."
--Hub (played by Denzel Washington)

Looking at it now, one of the most bizarrely unnerving aspects of the film are the aerial shots of New York -- a city portrayed in the movie as being under siege by terrorist attacks -- where the Twin Towers stand prominently amidst the skyscrapers of the city. Truth is stranger, and often more sinister, than fiction.

While it is not a perfect movie (some aspects are cheesy to the point of being downright Hollywood clichés), I liked it when it came out, and I think I like it now, but in a different way. When I first saw it, I wondered just how close to reality the story could be. In more ways than one, there are eerie similarities.

"You taught them how to make bombs... and now they're here, doing what you taught them how to do."

The other thing I liked/like about the movie is that its message consists of more than an overly simplified "terrorists = sandy little buttholes who are nothing but bad and evil". It tries to dig deeper, and in that regard, also manages to hit very close to home, to an almost nauseating degree.

The exact specifics are different, of course, but the general jist has so many parallels to what we have been seeing on the news, hearing politicians talk about, and reading about from miriads of sources, that direct mental comparisons between the movie and reality are inevitable.

Three years ago, this movie was simply a story. Good entertainment. A diversion. To quote the soundbites from critics on the box: "Exciting and compelling." "Tense and nerve-wracking" "Action-packed" (Sidenote: I now almost have to wonder how long it will be before copies of that cover get recalled from store shelves, to be replaced with something less crass, or perhaps not even replaced at all. Maybe it won't, and that's just my Orwellian sensors going overly paranoid. You never can tell for sure.)

Now, watching it is just... something. I'm not sure the experience can be readily categorized. I'm hesitent to call it entertainment, but in a way, it still is, I suppose. A study of a rare case where Hollywood manages to portray an event as being less severe than it actually turns out to be. It's funny to think that if they had made a movie portraying a catastrophy as huge as what would actually happen, many audiences, myself included, probably would have considered the writers to be pushing the limits of believability beyond anything credible.

But then we see the news.

Oh well. That's my review, such as it is. Seeing this one again was certainly an interesting experience.