"This is our Sharpeville," Ivan Cooper says, referring to the ghastly episode that has just unfolded virtually right before his eyes.  It's January 30, 1972, and Cooper, the leader of the Derry Civil Rights Association, is comparing the bloodletting he has just witnessed to the 1960 South African massacre of (relatively) peaceful protestors.  Anyone familiar with U2 knows this incident eventually became known as Bloody Sunday, but now, thanks to British filmmaker Paul Greengrass (The Theory of Flight), we have a dazzling new film of the same name that depicts those very events.

Granted, the body count in Sharpeville was much higher than the Free Derry incident, but that doesn't make Sunday any less compelling.  The film begins on the morning of that fateful day, and Greengrass starts his story by showing two different press conferences being held to discuss a planned march of protest through the streets of English-occupied Derry.  The march, according to Cooper (James Nesbitt), will be a peaceful, pro-human-rights demonstration and a rally against internment (at the time, Catholics in Northern Ireland were being rustled up and jailed without trial).  Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Major-General Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) tells reporters the march won't happen at all, if his soldiers have anything to say about it.

Greengrass flip-flops between these two characters, in addition to showing perspectives from both the British soldiers as well as a recently emancipated young protestor named Gerry Donaghy (Declan Duddy).  As you probably already know, the march doesn't go as planned for any of the above parties and results in horrifying bloodshed.  In short, the Brits believed they were taking fire from IRA supporters and responded with force.  Even if you know it's coming, it's still incredibly difficult to watch.  Women (bang!), teenagers (bang!), elderly (bang!), people waving white hankies while trying to attend to the injured (bang!) – and it's all due to a fatal cocktail of assumption, miscalculation and ignorance.

The film isn't woven together in a way we're used to seeing.  Editor Clare Douglas ends each scene with a fade-to-black, which at first is kind of irritating.  Then it becomes jarring.  Finally you become so engrossed in what's happening on the screen, you barely notice it at all. Desperately more startling is Greengrass's decision to shoot Sunday cinéma-vérité style, with endless in-your-face close-ups, using a handheld 16mm camera.  This chaotic effect, together with the film's gritty look and amazingly realistic makeup and costume work, makes the film look like actual archival footage from thirty years ago.

Of course, that's a problem if you don't like they way Greengrass presents the facts of Bloody Sunday (he adapted the script from a book by Don Mullan, who produces and appears here as a priest).  The Irish regard England's stance on the debacle as most Americans view the Warren Commission, while the English have stood by their story for over three decades (there's a brand-new inquiry currently underway, complete with protected identities for the British soldiers involved).  Personally, I think Greengrass kind of glosses over the British side of things in the first half, but he really pulls the rug out from under them in the second (numerous post-9/11 comparisons can be made in support of the Brits).

In a way, Sunday is a lot like the equally stylish Black Hawk Down (or a reverse version, maybe) in that it drops you into a dizzying, volatile, pressure-cooker of a situation that quickly snowballs out of control, while focusing on the what much more than the why – everyone has different ideas about why it happened, but this is what happened.  Like Down, Sunday wasn't as much written as it was choreographed, and its characters are empty cinematic cutouts, with the exception of the blazingly charismatic Nesbitt, whose Cooper comes off damn near Giuliani-esque, especially during the post-tragedy news conference.

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