Certain elements of plot are given away below, so don’t read if you’re spoiler-sensitive.

The story tells the view of events (a presidential assassination) as seen by several different people. First up is the news van – giving a blanket overview of what’s going on. The content is basic – the point of interest lies mostly in the technical goings-on in the OB van until the big event, the characters introduced on the screen have no major significance to the rest of the film, and the section ends more or less when the president has been shot and the two bombs detonated. The style similarly is fairly mechanical – typical GVs, paced cuts, in on the action and information.

Story two is from a secret service agent played by Dennis Quaid (backstory provided in the news section). In this we see what he’s interested in – fast crowd shots as he scans his surroundings for potential threats, close shots of him as he responds to what he sees – rapid but precise and still full of information. He responds to information that we aren’t allowed to see until later, the footage on a camcorder and one of the camera feeds from the news van, which seems to be a jump to the opposite perspective (as the people he interacts with have no idea why he does what he does next) but that does lend the character some authority in the midst of the chaos that very quickly surrounds him.

Story three is from a character previously introduced in the first two sections – first as having run up onto the platform immediately after the assassination, then declaring himself as a police officer protecting the mayor before escaping the scene with a gun in the second section. This section fills in some information and is the first to extend outside of the arena in which the president was shot and the second bomb detonated (which we now know he had taken in and handed to a girl who’d tried to kill him when she threw it under the stage near where he was being held by secret service agents). This is our first real ‘action’ character – his escape across the town is fast paced and action filled. We linger on characters who he recognises, realise the significance of certain characters and their actions for the first time because he knows that information, and once again ends on a confrontation.

Story four is that of an American tourist with a camcorder played by Forest Whitaker, previously noticed in the previous two stories as an information provider. We see long sweeping general shots, and focus on the minutae of inter-personal relationships, events like a small girl walking into him with an ice-cream… the little details which seem insignificant to most people – definitely the characters we’ve encountered so far. Some ultimately were, some had a greater role to play later or provided characterisation in advance. But even the way the tape in the camera was viewed by the secret service was played differently – I’d have to watch again to know for sure if it was purely down to the angles and editing or actually a subtly different performance (as in the 1999 Go) , but either is possible. This story extends a minute past the previous one, and cuts out when he realises that the little girl with the ice cream from earlier was about to get run over – the most significant event which could make him act.

Story five opens with the president who we’ve now seen get shot four times. The temptation to think “this’ll be short” passes as it’s revealed that they’re sending out a body double in his place, and he watches the ‘assassination’ on television in his hotel room… before a bomb (the first) explodes in the lobby of the hotel he’s staying in and a masked man breaks into his hotel room.

We then go back to the little girl getting her ice cream in a cafe with her mother, and as they leave the camera stays with a man talking on a hands-free kit in the cafe. This is our first clue that something’s changed. Leaving that character to meet another who we’ve previously seen arguing with the female bomber confirms it – we’re into conventional narrative. The story plays out from there and the previously missing information is supplied with all characters interweaving multiple times before ending up at the exact same spot.

What I find most interesting is the choice of where to break the single perspectives for each character, and the decision to suddenly combine them all when at least two characters have more or less played out their major parts. There was opportunity to play out a significant part of at least one further major character (or at least a general ‘terrorist’ POV), but then there may well have been too much blurring of statement or it could have taken the focus away from the events themselves if too much time was spent exploring reasons. Or now that the central event of the assassination had been proven false, a new style was needed. Or just that they’d done all of the pre-assassination stories that they needed to by that point and just kept going. Or decided which bits fit in best with the end continuous story and filled up to that point in the other viewpoints. I can’t help but feel that it would be interesting to know which alternatives were considered during editing. And how it was organised – the IMDb page lists 3 editors, 5 assistants and 2 apprentices.

But what do the regular audience think? Upon exiting the cinema, my viewing partner (my mother, on the last day of my Easter break) said “You know, they really could have gotten to the interesting bit sooner”. A point perhaps crassly made – and she doesn’t after all have a history of appreciating slow-burning films… but whether it was the ‘twist’, boredom with too many repeats of the ‘same’ story or the return to conventional multi-POV that re-engaged her I haven’t managed to determine.

In any case, editing commentary on the DVD? Please, Colombia?