Many believe the word "terrorist" came from the Reign of Terror during and following the French Revolution of the 1790s, but it was the 1972 Munich Olympics that entered it into the lexicon. Hence it's no surprise that a film from that latter era should exploit it (The Terrorists was released as Ransom in the U.S.).
The Terrorists begins with stock and second unit footage of terrorist activities. Mostly explosions and the resultant carnage. From there, two dramatized terrorist acts: an airplane hijacking and a hostage taking at the home of the British Ambassador to Scandinavia (the film's Scandinavian locales are in Norway). Soon enough the two events are related, and a hostage exchange is set up.
Of course the hostage exchange is manipulated by Scandinavia's Head of Security (played by Sean Connery), where the bus (above) filled with one group of hostages (in radio contact with the hijackers) is deliberately blocked in a tunnel and exchanged with a bus (below) of lookalikes. As for the airplane hi-jacking, that (we learn later) is also a manipulation (by the British Secret Service).
There are some other interesting moments in this formulaic yet quirky film by Finnish director Caspar Wrede, but I will leave it at that for now. One thing worth noting is that The Terrorists, like a lot of British film and literature from this period (see the novels of John le Carré, but not the "Bond" films adapted from Ian Fleming's books), is one of a number examples of what by then was a growing mistrust of the Cold War British state.
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