I woke up to my mother in my hospital room. She wanted to take me to her hotel, but it turned out I’d developed an infection and needed to spend the night. I wouldn’t let her watch her preferred angry news channel so we stared uncomprehendingly at volleyball until I fell asleep again. It was, apparently, the Olympics. I woke up to a screaming white face on the TV, words streaming manically in all directions on the screen. I pleaded for a sitcom, for the sweet release of narcotic death. We looked at gymnasts falling for a while, and by the time I passed out and woke up again some essential part of my confidence in the world’s essential stability and goodness had cracked.

Now, watching this movie, I became emotionally invested in the heroine’s plight, even as I struggled to understand exactly what she was fighting against. Her boyfriend seemed to be a robot, or maybe just insane. Either way he was a threat to the mission and no match for her other boyfriend, who was blandly beautiful and very committed to the cause. It had been a long time since I’d seen a movie like this, a corporate explosion movie, I mean, and I couldn’t tell if it was more violent and disturbing than the ones I’d grown up watching or if I’d just gotten old. What seemed different was the film’s insistence on the righteousness of terrorism if it was committed in the name of a good cause. Just a few years before, I thought, this might have been perceived as treasonous, or at least unsuitable for teenagers. Since there was no one else in the audience, it was difficult to know for sure how other people felt, but since the movie had made hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of the hundreds of millions made by the previous installments, not to mention the profits of the books the movies were based on, it seemed fair to assume that lots and lots of people were pretty down with it.