D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear

So I was browsing through the on-demand movies on BT Vision - Picturebox yesterday and couldnt settle on one I was in the mood for. I randomly picked this one however, not knowing anything about it, other than it was a made for TV job. Surprisingly it was a pretty well put together drama. Plenty of suspense and nicely styled. The truth about its plot made it horrific, yet in that typical human way - even more watchable. When you are hundreds of miles away from events like this, it becomes just a story on the radio or TV. Its ‘that sniper thing’ happening in America somewhere, and realistically you actually take no notice more than giving it a cursory eyebrow raise. Films like this do the job of filling in those gaps for you that the TV news didnt do at the time. They will always be controversial for capitalising on people’s pain. But surely if they open up the story to the whole world to see the horrors that people went through, thats a good thing isnt it? Isnt that better than people being shot needlessly and the rest of the world not batting an eyelid? Now I have some sense of the sadness and the horror of that moment in history I didnt have before. The film wasnt perfect - the wonderfully bad English accent of the fake UK newsreader sent me into spasms of laughter - but it did capture the moments of tension and fear which did not seem to communicate themselves to me during the whole period of the incident.