1. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime—so viscerally upsetting yet oddly triumphant, so unnervingly adept at transporting us back into the headspace of that horrible day, that it’s almost too much for a rewatch. My heart’s beating and I’m breathing more quickly just thinking about it. Greengrass’s specialty, even in the Bourne movies, is putting you at eye-level, right smack in the middle of the action. He can make you feel as disoriented as everyone involved, to the point that you feel like you are involved. It’s a powerful, sometimes overwhelming skill. It can be too much.
2. The first half hour of 22 July is, at times, near-impossible to watch. Greengrass has chosen to recreate the events of the 2011 Norway terror attacks by Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right white supremacist who set off a bomb in Oslo and then shot and killed 69 people, mostly teenagers and children, at a summer camp in Utoya. Of all the events he might wish to dramatize, this is perhaps the most gruesome and grueling: the random, indiscriminate shooting of children. But Greengrass, for better or worse, has a little bit more on his mind this time. Whereas United 93 focused solely on that flight, in nearly real-time, here the actual attacks only take up about a fifth of the film. The rest of the movie is Greengrass dealing with the aftermath, how politicians, victims, family members and Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) himself (along with his deeply anguished attorney) try to recover and react to the monstrous act. In this way, it’s like United 93 with a dramatization of The 9/11 Commission Report tacked onto the end.
3. Thus, after the shooting, portrayed with the horror and revulsion that you’d expect—especially since the director chooses to put Breivik front and center, a decision that has led to a certain amount of controversy—Greengrass follows several different plotlines. There is the macro reaction, how politicians and officials figure out what happened and how it could have been prevented, seen mostly through the eyes of Norway’s prime minister Jens Stolenberg (Ola G. Furuseth). We see Breivik and his lawyer (Jon Øigarden) battle back and forth, with the lawyer knowing his professional obligations but struggling not just with the moral implications but with the practical blowback of representing such a loathsome client. And mostly, we deal with the victims and their families, particularly Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli), who was shot multiple times by Breivik while trying to protect his brother and wakes up after a long coma with bullet shards in his brain stem and a potentially endless recovery. The message is clear: The shooting may have only lasted a few hours, but its ramifications billow out for decades to come.