22 July

I remembered hearing about the event on the news and being shocked by it at the time, but the film gave a much deeper insight into the tragedy. I actually cried watching this portrayal of the attack on those poor children. The cast did an excellent job with the English dialogue, but I'd have been fine watching it in Norwegian with English subtitles.

I don't understand all the bad reviews...people complaining that the film didn't show a larger proportion of the mass shooting in the beginning of the film. Whats wrong with you people. Everybody knows it went on for much longer...but who in the right mind wants to watch children being murdered in such circumstances for an hour. The shooting time int he movie went on for long enough and it was very harrowing and very sad. A very good film

There's really no law that's been written to give people a sense of justice when crimes like this are committed.

Mass Murderers must be insane by the very nature of what they do but the acts always bring out some anomaly in the law that entails a gruesome reenactment to get some sort of verdict. The mass killer thrives on the production. (Unless of course he gets killed in the process)

This movie is very well done with its portrayal of the killer as a soulless nutcase who comes across as almost normal in his interactions with everybody.... just like Bundy. Very difficult for the authorities to catch him before the heinous crime, but the aftermath of any of these events always shows that there were significant clues that the authorities should have picked up on.

So we end up blaming them and not the perpetrator. The State and the killer become the preoccupying participants and the victims and their families are only secondary to the matter. The grief of the families and the survivors is given a bit more attention in this movie and there are some very moving scenes.

Such an unbelievably tragic subject dealt with in a very compassionate way, the acting is quite well done and has to be understated because of the subject matter.

This is not a film to attend and expect to come out feeling better. It is a statement of the evil that exists in the world and a reminder that it can surface anywhere and anytime. It's worth watching just to get you to keep your antennae working.

July 22, rather than being a film about just the terror attack itself, spends most of its screentime on its consequences. Due to such a misleading title I can't say that the film met my expectations, though it still being a remarkable work.

We know Greengrass for directing excellent action-thrillers based on actual events (other than three Bourne films): United 93, Captain Phillips and Bloody Sunday are all accounts set in narrow time frames, that focus mainly on the action and have a documentaristic style.

When I first heard of '22 July', I thought it would be another action-thriller, focusing mostly or esclusively on the attack itself. The title seemed to suggest this too. I particularly liked United 93, so I really hoped for this film to follow that style. When, at the 30 minutes mark, the part focusing on the actual attack ended, I felt a bit disappointed.

Around three quarters of the film focus on the aftermath of the event, probably to differentiate it from another film being released this year that is also about the 22 July terrorist attack, but focuses solely on the events that occured on the island. This choice allows however some depth to the film, and introduces some deeper political subthemes that an action-thriller film would have not been able to tackle. A central theme of the movie, for instance, is right-wing extremism, a very actual topic in Europe and western society of nowadays.

The entire film is composed by two parallel narratives, one focusing on the perpetrator and the other on one of the victims. The two narratives have two meeting points, when the two characters they're focused on meet for the first time, and towards the end of the film. The parallelism is very strong in most of the scenes of the film, another remarkable aspect.

I particularly appreciated the choice of using norvegian actors for all the roles, an element that added realism. The actor portraying the terrorist did a particularly good performance.

So, don't expect to watch a thriller, but rather a "based on real events" film directed by maybe the best living filmmaker that had a past in war-reporting journalism.

I am a long time fan of Greengrass, he isn't always making great films, but some times he brings some real good nailbiters which i greatly enjoy. For example Captain Philips and The Bourne Ultimatum. And you immediately see his fingerprints all over this one as well, with it's shaky camera movements and quick pacing.

The first half of this movie is pretty good actually, albeit the way it is cut together bothered me. The timeline in which all this happens feels like a couple of days, but it took months. The attack itself took hours, but yet it feels like minutes. It sort of brought me out of the story, because i know this story really well, being a Norwegian, and reading all about this, following the trial and the events surrounding all of this, it was really distracting to see that Greengrass was in a rush to get from one scene to the next.

I'm not saying the movie should have been 5 hours long to depict all of this more accurately, but at least make it clear how much time is spent between the scenes. The way this movie is cut, it felt like the trial started one week after the attack on the island.

So i kept hanging in there, i liked the acting, i liked the directing, but when we crossed the half-way mark i started to dislike a lot of the things i saw, the rush to get through the trial, the creative freedoms they chose to implement, the acting slowly got worse for some weird reason, and the spoken English also got worse the closer we approached the end. The actors in this film are mostly Norwegians, and it's painful to listen to when we can't make the language sound more authentic. But the weird thing is, it sounded more authentic in the first half of the movie.

Overall this movie does tell the basics about this dreadful event, i personally know people that was on the Island during this attack, and i think the movie pays proper respects to them, i do. But i also have to see this as a movie, which it is. And then I'm not so impressed, this is not Greengrass at his best, but it's a fairly good film overall, and the first half is really intense. This movie could easily have been 20-30 minutes longer, the content is there, no short cuts was needed to make this movie, it only makes the event less terrifying in my opinion.

6/10 - Fair