The War on Terror has brought with it almost innumerable movies, dramas and documentaries regarding terrorism and its impact on the world. Last night, my wife and I watched Unthinkable – a movie which challenged us on many levels and left both of us struggling to digest what we had seen. Indeed I woke up this morning to my wife telling me that she could not sleep at all. What was playing on our minds was the ‘unthinkable’.

I find myself writing about this movie because of the layers of thought that had gone into its script. This was not your typical Jack Bauer type scenario where the hero must beat the clock to save America – in fact the movie challenged that very premise. Phillipe Sand’s Torture Team makes reference to American officials actually referencing the TV series 24 in their analysis of how to interrogate suspected terrorists, a scenario that has been widely accepted as being unreal. Yet with Unthinkable, despite taking on the ticking-bomb scenario as the basic structure for the plot, there was something far deeper about the message that was being put across.

Perhaps it is that the terrorist, Yusuf, claimed to be a patriot of the US as a convert to Islam? The archetypal terrorist in these circumstances is the one that claims that all Americans are dogs and that they should all burn in hell together – not that the person actually loves America. This was not your average ‘evil incarnated’ terrorist – his plans and their results are meticulously thought out, even to the extent that he factors in the torture of his own wife and children into any plans that he has made. I guess that is what made the movie even more interesting, that while the discussions relating to the torture of Yusuf take place, there is complete recognition that he planned that they should do this, that the military, CIA and FBI should prove the very point which he is trying to make – that they will disregard their values in order to achieve security.

The debate surrounding the use of torture is given a primary place within the movie as H (Samuel L Jackson) plays an interrogator with years of experience using torture. The method of conveying the rights and wrongs of the torture come through FBI Agent Helen Brody, played by Carrie-Anne Moss. She begins by immediately being horrified by what is taking place against Yusuf as she witnesses his abuse. The need for her to gain information from Yusuf regarding the location of three nuclear devices in US cities is strongly played off against H’s techniques – what is witnessed though is her level of acceptance is slowly increased as time draws closer to the deadline of the bombs exploding.

The staging point of the movie rests on the torture of Yusuf’s family – the ‘unthinkable’. Whether or not the wife and children should be tortured or even killed in order to coerce Yusuf into giving up the information that is required. H realises that Brody is the moral compass for the whole of the US in this context, and with that in mind requires her to be the one to take the children into the torture chamber – for H – Brody’s potential part in the interrogation would act as moral acceptance by the whole of the US that such a step is indeed necessary.  

As the above scenes are played out (and I will not spoil the decisions made) the thoughts we are asked to deal with concurrently relate to whether or not we actually believe the torture has worked. There is belief and disbelief in everything that Yusuf says to his interrogators, however at the same time there are questions that relate to the extent to which they have simply fallen into his plans. It is the value of the interrogations that the directors have really pushed the audience to reflect on. Was the loss of values worth the results achieved? Or were there indeed any results to speak of after the complete degradation of the US constitution? These are the important questions that rotate in the mind as non-Muslims and Muslims reflect on what this movie might mean to them.

Finally, the directors of the movie do not evade the question of foreign policy. Yusuf’s modus operandi is motivated by US presence and interference in the Islamic world, and this is clearly spelled out over the course of his interrogation. Although the movie very rarely portrays Yusuf other than as a villain, the addition of his logic for these actions has a great bearing on the way in which he is perceived by his interrogators and indeed provides a layer of logic to his argumentation that is very rarely seen in Hollywood.