Paul Greengrass, journalist-turned-director, has spent a lifetime navigating the space between truth and cinema. When he turned his hand at the Bourne series – for Supremacy (2004), Ultimatum (2007), and Jason Bourne (2016) – he lent them all their bare-knuckled weight and credibility; yet with every recreation of true-life tragedy he’s made, from Captain Phillips (2013) to 22 July (2018), we’re sucked back into the same conversation. At what point does the commitment to immersion, to the hope of startling an audience with the force of living history, teeter into pure exploitation?
His latest, The Lost Bus, does little to answer that question. The film has an urgent drive to its depiction of the 2018 Camp Fire that swept northern California’s Butte County, the deadliest in the state’s history. It’s not only a vivid reminder of where wilful inaction in the face of climate change has left us, but of where the blame lies in this particular instance – PG&E, or the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, whose poor maintenance of its power lines caused the initial spark.
