Bloody Sunday poster & wallpaper

Allan Gildea, Carmel McCallion, Cathy Kiera Clarke

A depiction of the events of the infamous bloody massacre which took place Sunday on January 30, 1972 when 27 civilians were gunned down by the British Army in the streets of Northern Ireland. The sto...( read more  read more... )ry revolves around two young men who are caught up in the crossfire. One is an idealistic civil rights leader, and the other a teenage Catholic boy. Witness testimony contradicts the official findings of the government-sponsored investigation committee, which, in the first few months following the tragedy, cleared the British Army of any wrongdoing. The events fueled a 25-year cycle of violence between Britain and elements of Ireland, North and South.

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6,952 ratings

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92% liked it

101 critics

R, 1 hr. 47 min.

Directed by: Paul Greengrass

Release Date: January 1, 2002

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DVD Release Date: April 22, 2003

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James Nesbitt as Ivan Cooper in Bloody Sunday (2002) Bloody Sunday Bloody Sunday Bloody Sunday
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Flixster Reviews (482)

  • irisheyes686
    October 21, 2009
    irisheyes686
    This movie took FOREVER to get going. I was really bored until about an hour into it. What happened was pretty horrible though - very sad.
  • organgrinder136
    January 27, 2009
    organgrinder136
    brutal
  • wellmeetagain
    September 9, 2008
    wellmeetagain
    Red letter date for "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. Hand held camera lends a documentary like feel. Recommended.
  • rebvodka042099
    August 4, 2008
    rebvodka042099
    In this documentary-styled drama film you can see everything you could be looking for in a movie of this genre and kind: it's fast-paced, makes you hold your breath, informs you fully and orbicularly and above all else, it's filled with blood-boiling action. Greengrass's directio...( read more)n is once again wonderful, but the actors don't give their best. The film's weakest point has to be the few slowly-progressing parts at the first half of the movie.
  • EarthlyAlien
    July 21, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "This afternoon, twenty-seven people were shot in this city. Thirteen of them lie dead tonight. They were innocent. We were there. This is our Sharpville. This is our Amritsar Massacre. A moment of truth and a moment of shame. And I just want to say this to the British Governm...( read more)ent... You know what you've just done, don't you? You've destroyed the civil rights movement, and you've given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young men... boys will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind."

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    Director-writer Paul Greengrass made his first film in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1981. Two decades later he has detonated a bomb that has wiped away more than thirty years of political missteps and military secrecy in Bloody Sunday, an unwavering recreation of the violent blood-stained destruction that caught this town and many of its peaceful inhabitants unaware and unprotected back on January 30, 1972. The moral fragments and mental shock will linger long after this film has ended.

    Relentlessly realistic in its in-your-face close-up detail, Greengrass and Ivan Strasburg, his long-standing DP, have opted for a colour-desaturated look that has drained every ounce of blue that might have been in the Derry sky that day. Every shot uses almost nauseating, hand-held cameras, with not a steady shot in sight. The incessant documentary-style most closely resembles on of those Reality-TV shows, sans music (except for the end-credit rendition by U2 of its mournful ode to the killings), with the equivalent of two or three separate units following the civilian population, primarily Ivan Cooper, a middle-class protestant and member of Parliament who was leading a massive civil rights march that Sunday, and the stubborn British commander and his military units taking up positions throughout the city. To further orchestrate the concurrent time-line of events, Greengrass and his editor Clare Douglas have extensively cross-cut each storyline within the shared narrative, separately often, but not always, by quick fades to and from black.

    An introductory sequence announces the leadership for the 10,000 locals eager to peacefully congregate and the British Army, having been through a series of minor embarrassments at the hands of juvenile hooligans and IRA-sponsored saboteurs. The soldiers, some very green, but most overly anxious, have been called in to strike down the event. Greengrass, to more personalize his day-in-a-life approach, next focuses on a post-midnight parting of Gerry Donaghy (Declan Duddy, whose uncle was the first to die on the actual Bloody Sunday), a 17-year-old Catholic having just served a six-month sentence for stone throwing, and his cautious, Protestant girlfriend, just off from a long night of babysitting. Gerry's story highlights the lad's subdued, almost childlike, anger with the British invasion and, ultimately, his inclination to react rather than act against the well-armed militia. "I'll be fine. It's only a march," he casually assures his family. His tragedy embodies that of the Everyman; his demise becomes all the more a battle-cry for the IRA by the planting of false materiel, as least as Greengrass tells us.

    Biblically speaking, if Gerry is the very young son, Cooper is the wise one. As portrayed by James Nesbitt, it's a performance of a determined, perhaps too idealistic ("One day we could be normal.") individual trying to organize his friends and the good people of Derry, modelling this peaceful demonstration after those by Martin Luther King. The simple son then becomes Brigadier Patrick MacLellen (Nicholas Farrell), the local commander of the British Army in Londonderry nervously walking the tightrope between his friend, local Chief Superintendent Lagan (Gerald McSorley), and (foolish son) Major General Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith), the unflinching Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, eager to strategically teach the "hooligans" a lesson at the hands of his 3,000 troops. Not only does he force his battle plan on the wary MacLellen, he's got one officer handling public relations to soothe out any "misconceptions" that might arise from the planned action.

    The chants of "We Shall Overcome" are too quickly immersed in the ensuing melee, begun when a portion of the crowd takes a wrong turn and further aggravated when this breakaway group (of which Gerry and his friends are part) confronts the army with chants of "Brits Out" and the hurling of stones and bricks. The hostilities escalate and for the second half of the film you stare speechless as the bullets fly and the blood flows, with the soldiers unleashing their weapons as if shooting at a pond full of ducks. As expected, your reaction is immediate as powerfully manipulated by the filmmaker. The action moves from the gruesome street battlefield, home to the indiscriminate murder of more than a dozen unarmed civilians, to the chaotic Altnagelvin Hospital, where the wounded and dead are greeted by grieving relatives and an emotional drained and exasperated Cooper.

    This stuff is harrowing enough on page; it is almost too much to bear on-screen. There are none of the distractions, the forced melodramas of a Hollywood death scene, so prettily shot and in slo-mo. Here, a man is cut down; the sniper and the camera quickly move on to the next. By making his film look like real life, Greengrass has far more effectively conjured the real-life terror - and tragedy - of Bloody Sunday. None of the parties are victorious. The Brits - despite having been commended by the crown - had shot themselves in the foot, and the martyred dead would benefit not the civil rights movement but the IRA. Indeed, in one of the film's last shots, shell-shocked young men are seen lining up to enlist. No victories here, but Greengrass' film is a triumph in anguish. Filmmaking in its purest state.
  • davecoff
    November 21, 2009
    davecoff
    just shocked wat a film
  • InfamousHugo
    November 8, 2009
    InfamousHugo
    BLOODY SUNDAY (2002)
    dir. Paul Grengrass
    cast. James Nesbitt, Allan Gildea, Gerard Crossan

    Bloody Sunday tells the true story of the march turned massacre which took place on Sunday, Janurary 30th 1972 in Nothern Ireland. Originally people were marching for civil

    ...( read more)rights but its was declared illegal and the army showed up. After a few of them pretend they heard a few gun shots they open fire on civilians and then happens what happened.

    Paul Greengrass's film follows both side, the people marching for the rights and the army people setting their plans to stop them. It follows a few people on both side to make sure we wont get lost and its quite effective, even if its a bit too long and too slow to start.

    Bloody Sunday is one of those films, like Hotel Rwanda, its very frustrating, to see innocents being killed. It gets even worst when you see how the army tries to cover up their mess. People died on that day for no reasons. Its kind of amazing when you think about it cause you'd expect that kind of event to take place in the U.S. but it happened to Irish people.

    Bloody Sunday is shot with a hand-held camera making it look like a documentary and it works but there is something quite annoying about the editing.

    It is quite disturbing and movie. At the end of the film, they name all the real life victims which is pretty neat, then roll the credits, featuring a live version of U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday. It had been a while since I watched the entire credits of a film.
  • anastasia57001
    October 19, 2009
    anastasia57001
    Greengrass is not my cup of cake, generally speaking (AND i wouldn't even discuss TEA) but I can tell he's excellent here- in a concept that I can actually enjoy. ZlatkoGR reminded me of the film and I thought that I should drop a line or two for this political film which redefin...( read more)ed the relationship between fiction and documentary film-making.
  • ZlatkoGR
    October 19, 2009
    ZlatkoGR
    A great piece of reality, a shocking and powerful movie, a study on docudramas, fast and chilling. The story draws you in immediately and Greengrass did a great job with the hand-held camera. And the question remains: Is "no violence" even possible?
  • ElCochran90
    September 18, 2009
    ElCochran90
    A wonderfully developed perspective of a shocking true story.

    72/100

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Critic Reviews

October 25, 2002
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

Greengrass has achieved such immediacy that it's hard to believe that what we're watching isn't really unfolding before our eyes. full review

October 25, 2002
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

As an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene. full review

October 25, 2002
Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

It's an extraordinary adrenaline-pumping immersion into historical events, and goes along way to explain the bitterness that has resounded from that day. full review

October 10, 2002
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

A bracing, unblinking work that serves as a painful elegy and sobering cautionary tale. full review

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Bloody Sunday Trivia

  • What word is missing: ------ Mary ------ Sunday My ------ Valentine  Answer »
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