Old and tired? Raid on Entebbe.
New hotness? Raid of Entropy…
It was only Seven Days in Entebbe, but it felt like an eternity. The rescue in July 1976 by Israeli commandos of 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda was a scriptwriter’s dream: a three-act drama of crisis, complication and resolution, in which the good guys won—good guys that is, unless you were rooting for the hijackers to murder 106 men, women and children for no other reason than they were Jewish. Three films were in production almost immediately. None were made by Arabs or Germans.
(…)
The movie business loves a remake, but the Entebbe story is too familiar. All that remains is for someone to make Moral Defeat at Entebbe. Step forward José Padilha, who should not be confused with Jose Padilla. Padilha is the Brazilian director who remade RoboCop. Padilla is the homegrown Islamist currently serving a twenty-one year stretch for trying to make a dirty bomb. If he behaves himself and gets a DVD player as a privilege, he would probably enjoy Seven Days in Entebbe, at least until the last five minutes.
The unique selling point of Seven Days in Entebbe is that, instead of focussing on the [suffering] of the hostages of the bravery of their rescuers, it focuses on the [conscience] of the hostage-takers and the Israeli politicians.
(PS: The US Speccie needs a proofreader. I spotted those two typos at 6am with no coffee. Expect more.)
The “nostalgia” the author eventually, dryly, addresses isn’t mine, quite:
It’s a pining for a time when the terrorists, like the terrorised, had secular ideologies, and there was still hope of negotiating with them. You know, the good old days. When the terrorists only killed Jews, and the European governments could feed the crocodile, by paying off the hijackers and helping them on their way to Libya or Iraq, where they could plot another atrocity.
No, quite the opposite:
I miss the days when no one but their fellow freaks “understood their motivations, if not their methods” — a well-rehearsed rhetorical gambit that was practically one very long word, as familiar to my ears back then as the jingles for Coke and McDonald’s.
The days when we blew the terrorists away, in a Los Angeles “safe house” or on the tarmac in Africa.
The days when we all (not just some of us, like today) hated the “Arabs” and cheered for Israel, for the Jews, and their, to us, seemingly new-found determination to be macho ass-kickers.
Anyway:
This is the excuse I needed to post a clip from the greatest movie ever made, which is, of course, Delta Force…
