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Members of the FBI forensics team lean closer to examine the test results. "This is a plasmagram of the Semtex used in Bus 87," says an investigator, pointing to a jagged red line tracking across a computer monitor. "The signature is identical to that used in the Marine barracks." The men and women around him stand motionless, their stomachs churning at the thought that the explosive used to kill a dozen commuters riding a bus to work was precisely the same as the one used in the terrorist blast that took the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in 1983.But the FBI's woes have just begun. Days later, scores of firefighters and law enforcement officials stare in horror at a massive Manhattan office tower that has been reduced to rubble. As the body count multiplies, soldiers march door to door rounding up Arab males for questioning. And in the bowels of a nearby building, an American woman stands over a detainee -- his naked body exposed to the glare of overhead lights, his head bowed in fear. He has yet to be formally charged with a crime, but the woman refuses to let up in her efforts to coax a confession out of him. Minutes later, he's dead.
These scenes have become agonizingly familiar, ticking by one by one since the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And yet something's not quite right. Through the camera's lens, we pull back from the chaos in the streets, and there, soaring over the skyline, are the twin towers, still standing. How?
Because none of what you've just read is real. These scenes are from a movie, but not one in which digital animators have resurrected the towers. Instead, they're the product of Hollywood's sometimes prescient imagination -- in this case, brought to life in The Siege, a 1998 film that envisioned New York City under a stupendous terrorist attack. That's right: 1998.
Lawrence Wright, who wrote the screenplay, recalls feeling sickened when he watched the heart-rending newscasts of the actual attacks three years later. "There was a cinematic quality that was in some respects absurd but still undeniable," he says. "Then I realized, it looked like my movie. Over time, I watched events play out beat by beat -- American soldiers in the streets, the rounding up of Arab Americans, eventually the torture and these civil liberty questions that we're still dealing with."
What made The Siege so unsettling was not the cinematic violence that rained down on New York. After all, Godzilla, also released in 1998 and starring a cranky mutant dinosaur, wreaked more havoc on the Manhattan cityscape. But that was escapist fare, whereas The Siege and other recent Hollywood productions are sometimes unnervingly realistic.
In Executive Decision (1996), Arabs hijack an airliner intending to wipe out Washington with a biological weapon that's on the plane. In Air Force One (1997), Russian neo-nationalists capture the President and demand the release of their incarcerated leader. In True Lies (1994), Arnold Schwarzenegger detonates air-to-air missiles to take out jihadists.
Hollywood, for all its follies, takes great pride in well-researched productions that strive for authenticity, especially when it comes to subjects like warfare, the military and the threat of terrorism. Before writing The Siege, Lawrence Wright immersed himself in government analyses of global terrorist activities and interviewed military, FBI and counterterrorism experts. He also had history to borrow from -- the first bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993, and two years later a foiled plot by Islamic extremists who planned to blow up Manhattan's Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the FBI headquarters, the building demolished in The Siege.
Studying the latest weaponry and security threats is one thing. Applying creative scenarios to terrorist tactics is another. When you realize that movies made in the mid-'90s actually predicted events, you begin to wonder if the military should be seeking Hollywood's counsel, not the other way around.
In TNT's summer miniseries The Grid, Silas Carson plays a doctor who slowly develops a hatred for the West. To prepare for the role, he was carefully schooled in Arab culture and Islamic principles, so that he -- and the audience -- could better understand the motives of so-often stereotyped Islamic terrorists. "The show," says Carson, "really tests your black-and-white view of the world."
Such credibility and accuracy is vital to cultivate the viewer's trust and elicit the emotional response filmmakers covet. In 1997's The Peacemaker, the story of a Serbian renegade who plots to set off a nuclear blast at the UN, actors George Clooney and Nicole Kidman discover a bomb in the man's backpack. "Tell me what you see," says Clooney. Kidman, playing a brainy, excitable scientific type, surveys a long tube in the center of which sits a metallic sphere the size of a softball. "An SS18 primary with a plutonium core," she says. "A bomb inside a bomb, it has a capacity-relay detonator, double-pull, double-throw."
Meaningless to most, concedes Peacemaker director Mimi Leder, but thoroughly effective. "We did a lot of research into what exactly a bomb looks like, how you detonate it, how she could defuse it," she says. "Those were real terms. The important part is that it really scared you."
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