Bobby Sands: 66 Days movie review (2016)

Otherwise, Sands' writing is exclusively political. Byrne follows suit by populating the movie with an assortment of historians, experts (from former IRA members to a medical professional who focuses on starvation), and politicians. It's one of those documentaries in which the central arguments seem happened-upon—almost as if by chance—by the observations and opinions of the talking heads within it.

In other words, the impact of the movie comes in spurts, connected to a few keen insights from this historian or that expert. Of particular intrigue, for example, is a brief dissection of the use of hunger strikes in Irish—and especially Irish republican—history, as well as how the means of protest ties into religion (no one denies intentionally connecting Sands' suffering to that of Jesus) and a philosophy of conflict. Along with the other detainees at the internment camp, Sands read works from an assortment of revolutionaries. One of the main takeaways was the rationale for the two prison hunger strikes, the first of which a year prior failed to have any effect: War is not won by inflicting suffering but by displaying one's ability to survive inflicted suffering.

The contradiction, of course, is the death toll, with a significant number of civilians, caused by the Provisional IRA during the Troubles. It's a contradiction that Byrne acknowledges with numbers and, perhaps, the hope that enough time has passed for it to be a matter of historical fact without any moral reckoning.

The moral stance, of course, was the one promoted by the British government, led at the time by Margaret Thatcher, who took a hardline stance against offering any concessions to Sands and his fellow inmates. The ways Thatcher and her administration navigated the international attention Sands' strike brought to the cause of Irish nationalism are fascinating here, if only because the government essentially used the same tactic the IRA used in regards to Sands.

The government dehumanized him, as a criminal—and only a criminal—deserving of punishment, in order to undermine sympathy for him and his cause (the government's reaction as the strikers die is a heartless piece of political strategy); the IRA dehumanized Sands to turn him into a symbol. For its own part, "Bobby Sands: 66 Days" doesn't reclaim its subject's humanity.