71 - Belfast back in the day

With my job now taking me up to Leamington 2 nights a week I am planning to use the time up here to catch up on films in the evenings.  Last week I watched something I've been meaning to watch for ages when it appeared on my film horizon a year or so ago - 71.  This is a film that tracks the nightmare that one unwilling soldier from Derbyshire finds himself in when him and his unit get shipped out to Northern Ireland in 1971 in the middle of the Troubles.  When a riot breaks out and he becomes isolated from his unit, he is lost in a foreign world inside his own country, and becomes entangled in a world he doesn't understand as he tries to survive.

In 71, Jack O'Connell plays Gary Hook.  O'Connell was recently the star of Angelina Jolie's underwhelming directorial debut Unbroken, however what's clear from his performance here that he'll be making marks in the film world in the future.  Hook is training with the rest of his unit and are expecting to be shipped out to West Germany as part of the UK's Cold War operations there.  However they are suddenly and unexpectedly sent to Belfast, where they become an enemy of the people inside the borders of their own nation.  The film follows Hook as he becomes lost from his unit, becomes the target of IRA hitmen, British Army infiltrators and saboteurs on both sides worried that he will give them away.

This is a film that is absolutely brutal in its portrayal of this conflict, and hardly shies away from the terror and angst that was created in a community still struggling to leave this recent past behind it.  I have relatives from Ulster and have been to county Antrim in the heart of the Loyalist North, but I struggle to comprehend the division and hatred that people felt for their countrymen who often lived only streets away.  It's a battle that's been going on for hundreds of years, a battle that seems alien to people from the rest of the UK.  It's a battle that a majority in Northern Ireland also hope is in the past.  This is a film that attempts to convey some of that baffling and terrifying complexity to the uninitiated - it's a film that anyone with an interest in the modern history of the UK should watch.