Patriots Day

Question: How accurate is the carjacking scene?

Question: Was Dzhokhar really slapped to the ground from off the boat as depicted in the movie? Or was that exaggerated to show the finality of the authorities finally getting him?

Question: Was Veronica the interrogator only pretending to be a fellow Muslim in order to get Katherine to talk, to make her feel more at ease communicating with her?

Question: How were the brothers able to steal the second car, after their hostage escaped? Or was that their car? They just jumped in and drove away with no apparent time or effort spent.

applejackson

Answer: The smaller car belonged to them. They go and pick it up again after Dun Meng escapes the Mercedes at the gas station.

ThisRaines

Thank you! With hindsight, maybe that's obvious, but I didn't catch it when I watched the movie.

applejackson

Question: How did they work out Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were the bombers?

Answer: The Tsarnaev brothers were telegraphing their complicity in the bombings by their crimes as they were trying to escape Boston police, such as shooting the campus cop, carjackings, and throwing pipe bombs at the cops during curfew and a dragnet/door-to-door search in the area. Shootouts and throwing bombs at law enforcement officers after a deadly bombing would attract the attention of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

Scott215

Question: Why did the Boston marathon bombers do what they did? Why did they target the Boston marathon?

Answer: The brothers were indoctrinated into the terrorist tactic of inflicting as much damage as possible on as large a stage as possible. Since the Boston Marathon was an annual event important not only to Bostonians but to participants from around the world and world news media would be covering it, then it made sense to the Tsarnaev brothers to kill/maim as many people as possible and achieve maximum exposure via the news media. Those two goals were easily met by their attack on the Boston Marathon.

Scott215

Question: Did the argument on whether or not to make the bombers' photos public really take place?

Answer: In short, no it likely did not. In real life the FBI voluntarily released the photos of the suspects to the press with a message to the public to help identify the suspects. The FBI statement also claimed they were doing this to help protect people wrongly identified as suspects on social media. While it is possible there could have been some back and forth privately regarding the photo release, it is also relatively common for law enforcement to release photos of suspects to the public for the same reasons as were done in the Boston Marathon bombings.

BaconIsMyBFF

According to history vs. Hollywood there really was a debate on whether or not to release the photos.

Question: Why did the Tsarnaev brothers have Dun Meng go with them when they take his car? Why didn't they just take it and leave Dun Meng behind?

Answer: As an insurance policy to escape. Since they had just confessed to him that they were the marathon bombers, they had no reason to believe that he wouldn't go the police the moment they were out of sight.

Cubs Fan

Question: Were the bombers members of a terrorist organization?

Answer: They were not members of any terrorist group. They taught themselves how to build bombs with internet research and acted alone.

BaconIsMyBFF

Continuity mistake: When the police are moving in to arrest Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the shot shows an FBI SWAT officer grabbing him. But in the next cut, the officer changes to a Boston Police Officer while changing back to a FBI Officer in the following shot.

More mistakes in Patriots Day

Dun Meng: Go catch those motherfuckers.

More quotes from Patriots Day

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