Time capsule

David Denby's 1998 New Yorker review of The Siege:

New York is terrorized by Islamic militants. Bombs go off everywhere; casualties climb into the hundreds; no one can go shopping. A hard-driving F.B.I. agent (Denzel Washington) kills some of the bad guys, but not all of them, so a sardonic, fascist U.S. Army general (Bruce Willis) declares martial law and seals off Brooklyn with tanks and troops. Director Edward Zwick turns on the sorrowful spectacle: The Army rounds up every young Arab-American male in the borough and herds them all into an open-air stadium. The F.B.I. agent then lectures the general on civil liberty. Torture is bad, he says. Shredding the Constitution is bad. "The Siege" offers an improbable set of circumstances and then gets all hot under the collar as it rejects the preposterous situation that it has set up for itself [emphasis mine].