"Suddenly Sam Jackson decides to tell them to blast the crowd? All the Marines point there weapons downward and rake the crowd, but again, nobody fires straight ahead at the rooftop snipers."
Dead wrong.
1. SJ orders his second in command to "engage hostile targets as they appear".
2. The second in command gets it wrong and assumes he means the crowd.
3. Second in command asks for confirmation of the order.
4. SJ confirms the order wrong, not by repeating er word for word, but by saying "waste the *beep*
5. The second in command, still acting on the assumption that he is talking about the crowd, opens fire on the wrong target.
6. SJ has no reasson to assume that his second in command didn't see weapons in the crowd.
The rest is people making up or adding little details of their own, as befits their agenda, whether they do it consciously or not.
It is a movie about a simple misunderstanding that gets a lot of people killed, and everyone trying to cover their ass afterwards. The politicians who screw over their servicemen, the defense council that is willing to play the 'evil muslim' card to get their guy off, and Samuel Jackson convincing himself he saw the victims firing at him, even the little one-legged girl. The absurdity should be pretty damn obvious.
The video showing weapons in the crowd was added in post production I assume, but it was really unneccesary. At the time of the incident, we have seen no weapons in the crowd, and so it made zero difference to the information acted upon when SJ made the decision to open fire. It was added because the test audiences were too dumb to figure out what was really going on in the movie.
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camel-wides
12 years ago
sorry, but no, he made it very clear his orders were to fire into the crowd. he defended that action.
his whole defense was based around that fact.
he believed the crowd to be the signifigantly greater threat than the snipers due to their firing on the embasy with small and automatic weapons, and their eminant breach of the embassy.
there was no miscommunication.
yes, his second in command questioned the order, said there were women and children n his line of fire... which kind of confuses me, since if he didn't see any protesters with firearms as he later claims, he wouldn't have any reason to feel those women and children were in his line of fire.
but that is neither here nor there...
sam jackson character fully intended for his marines to fire into the crowd.
even in the courtroom during the scene where he was asked about the "waste the *beep* order... and then shown pictures and confirms those are the *beep* he meant several times.
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janos-schumacher
10 years ago
The point is the fog of war. Full stop.
The part with the justification of returning fire should have never been added. I swear that I don't remember the scene where the tape proves the Colonels situation. My foggy memory of over a decade ago, left the movie open. And that's a better movie.
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Totemkauf
10 years ago
The simple answer is orders. There were no initial orders given to respond to sniper fire with retaliation. When the order was finally given to engage the crowd, the snipers fled. There was some line of dialogue about how the snipers and crowd were 'working together' or something like that, like it was planned to make the US look bad.
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