Ed Zwick's The Siege Features Fine Acting but Suffers from a Flawed Screenplay

When this film was released in 1998, the topic of Islamic-inspired terrorism and how American law enforcement, the intelligence community, and the military would respond to - or even be aware of - a series of escalating attacks in the United States was somewhat idealistic and based on serious misconceptions and wishful notions. 

After all, up until then the most serious attempt to strike full-blooded terror in the American consciousness had been the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, and very few people outside the Pentagon, the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, or Central Intelligence Agency HQ in Langley, Virginia knew who Osama Bin-Laden was and what his extremist agenda for the Islamic world really entailed.

Director Edward Zwick (Glory, Courage Under Fire), working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes, was probably aiming to give moviegoers a serious and thoughtful thriller that explored the possible consequences of a major terrorist campaign by jihadists hell-bent on gaining the release of a radical cleric based on the Sheik who was accused of inspiring the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. 

What would happen, Zwick and his collaborators ask, if a chain of gruesome bombings took place in New York City? Would the FBI and CIA be able to cooperate efficiently? Would an entire religious minority be seen with suspicion and fear, as the Japanese-Americans once had been after Pearl Harbor? Would the use of American military forces in a huge metropolis like New York City be a boon to homeland security, or would it be the death knell of democracy as we now know it?