"Vuja de," a term coined by the inimitable George Carlin*, is a good description of how through-the-looking-glass I feel watching The Siege, the eerily premonitory 1998 movie starring Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and Bruce Willis, and directed by Edward Zwick (much better than his The Last Samurai).** I won't bother trying to untangle its convoluted plot; at bottom, it's a thriller about Islamic terrorist attacks on New York City. Each of the attacks foreshadows something that hadn't happened yet in 1998. Within days, a city bus [Jerusalem], a crowded Broadway theater [Moscow], a schoolroom [Beslan], and a downtown federal building are targeted — the last (by suicide van) leaving a pit of wreckage so September 11-like that you almost wonder, hairs on end, who got whose ideas from whom. To make things even more chilling and disorienting, the intact twin towers twinkle in the background in more than one establishing shot.

The best thing in the film is Bening's riveting performance as a despicably corrupt yet somehow poignant CIA agent. But all that gets overshadowed by the weird resonances between prior fantasy and subsequent reality, the ways life imitated art and the many more ways it didn't. Although the attacks are smaller than 9/11 — after all four, the death toll is in the hundreds — the fact that there are four in quick succession makes the city seem in a way even more helpless before the terrorists than it felt in 2001. And of course in the film the government reacts far more Strangelovingly, imposing martial law within days, with Willis's mad patriot general putting tanks in the streets and innocent Brooklyn Arabs behind razor wire. This is a Hollywood movie, after all: the initial terror caused by the attacks, which seems so devastatingly real to anyone who's lived through 9/11, is quickly swept away (oh, for the good old days when the blood was fake!) by the far greater menace of our very own government, while in a weird switcheroo the terrorists come to seem almost sympathetic, the pure products of broken American promises; after all, the Annette Benings of the CIA trained, seduced and then abandoned them! To clear the way for sympathy, the filmmakers make sure to have the terrorists let all the little kids out of the bus before blowing it up (awwwww!), and we are spared fully confronting the horror of the bomb in the schoolroom when Denzel somersaults through the door and kills the terrorist before he can detonate it.

In "real life," it is equally unimaginable that Arab-Americans would have been herded en masse into internment camps (the real civil-rights picture is much spottier, with some innocent Muslims detained incommunicado for months while we bend over backwards not to racially-profile airline passengers), and that, in the terrified days and weeks after 9/11, New Yorkers could have marched en masse in the streets with signs saying . . . "NO FEAR." The realest thing in the movie is the way, after the attacks, everyone hits the ground when a bus backfires. Just like New Yorkers look up whenever a plane goes over.