Title:  9/11

Release Date:  2002

Nationality and Language: USA, English

Running time: about 120 minutes

MPAA Rating:  PG-13

Distributor and Production Company:  CBS, Nextel (corporate sponsor)

Director; Writer: James Hanlon and Robert Klug

Producer:

Cast:  Robert De Niro (narrator, host) with Steve Buscemi ; French filmmakers Jules Naudet and Gedeon Naudet

Technical: television

Relevance to doaskdotell site:

Review:

This is CBS’s controversial docudrama of the events of 9-11-2001 from the point of view of members of the New York City Fire Department, as filmed by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. Most of the footage in this film was taken as the events folded from the street that day of infamy.

The first thirty minutes of the film shows life in a typical NYC fire department, including the training and washout. It certainly takes a more conventionally socialized male to be a fireman (I would say “warrior” but that is misleading) and life in a fire department has many of the features of the military – including bunking overnight and unit cohesion. (In the 1970s the acceptance of gays had been resisted for the same reasons it would later be opposed by the military in the 1990s and even the Boy Scouts/)

The firemen are doing routine street manhole checks when a plane roars and whines over them. The hit on the North Tower of the World Trade Center is shown real time. Within one minute the fire department was there setting up the command center. The lobby would stay surprisingly intact almost until the time the tower fell. The sounds of the people who jump make huge slamming sounds as the hit outside, although the film does not show the people on camera. The South Tower hit is heard in audio as the firemen work.  It is then (17 minutes after the first plane) that everyone knows that this is a terrorist attack, and that the world is changed forever. The South Tower would collapse first, and from many viewpoints it was hard to see that it was actually falling behind the smoke (ABC did not report that it had fallen for about ten minutes.)  Even many of the firemen did not know for a while that it had collapsed.

The enormous dust storm and blackout is captured in detail after the North Tower collapse, as the photographer was caught in the tornado and nearly perished.

At least 343 NYC firefighters perished in this tragedy. The web site for details and for contributions is http://www.nyfd.com/  The Company was Engine 7, Ladder 11.

The film was rebroadcast on Sept 10, 2006 by 2006 in competition with the ABC “Path to 9/11” (below).

Here is a news compilation from NBC as it happened on YouTube.

On Sunday, September 10, 2006 (one day before the fifth “anniversary” of 9/11), ABC will air the film “The Path to 9/11” directed by David L. Cunningham, with Harvey Keitel. The six hour film (is it over two nights?) has been criticized for supposed inaccuracies. Howard Kute, “Clinton Administration Officials Assail ABC’s ‘The Path to 9/11’” The Washington Post, Sept 7, 2006.  ABC does have a disclaimer maintaining that the film is not a docudrama and is not necessarily completely factual. Bill Clinton’s lawyers actually asked ABC to pull the film. It is supposed to be based on the 9/11 commission report. In Washington DC WJLA TV also maintains that the film does not represent its views. 

The film (2006, Touchstone/ABC, about 270 min, would probably be PG-13, TV-14) aired the first 2-1/2 hours on Sept. 10 2006) starts with a prequel of the morning of 9/11 and then goes back 8-1/2 years to Feb 26, 2006, a snowy Friday in New York City, when a truck bomb was detonated in a parking garage below the WTC. That sequence is well done, but the film bogs down a bit in tracing the terrorists. The scenes in Pakistan are often shown with yellowish filters. The liquid explosive plot in 1995 of Yousef, to take down planes in the Pacific, is broken up when a terrorist accidentally sets fire to his Manila apartment. The film shifts to the problems in the Clinton administration and FBI Agent John O’Neill, played by Harvey Keitel, who apparently started work on 9/11/2001 and died there. (The story recalls that of Port Authority Security Officer Rescorda, above; they are both on the victims list.)  There is a sequence where administration officials downplay plans to assassinate bin Laden – who has taken over from Yousef as the main villain. President Clinton still sees this as a law and order problem, even as his advisors talk of going to war. That approach at least worked at the border in Washington State in December 1999 as a female customs agent makes a major bust. The bombings in Africa in 1998 are shown, as well as the careless cruise missile strike. The history of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan begins, and it would be good to check with author Sebastian Junger about its accuracy (Massoud). Zawahiri is shown as skeptical of the size of the planned attacks. In the meantime, there is a clip about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky that seems rather irrelevant. The film as shown does not seem to be too unfair to the Clinton crowd, but there was a general inertia in appreciating that this really was a war, although that point comes up. Also starring are Patricia Heaton (as Yemen Ambassasdor Bodine), Dan Lauria (as CIA director George Tenet), Amy Madigan (as Patricia Carver), and Stephen Root (as David Clark), and Shlrley Douglas (as secretary of state Madeline Albright). 

The second half (interrupted by President Bush’s address) picks up speed and is much more in Oliver Stone style. The bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 leads to a confrontation with a sassy Ambassador Bodine, who has to defend the political arrangements that allow the Bin Laden family to do half the business in Yemen. (Many ordinary people from that part of the world have met members of that family, including someone known to me – “three degrees of separation”.) Pretty soon the warning signs and chatter accumulate. Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested in a grungy Minneapolis apartment, and Coleen Rowley, who apparently plays herself (she retired in 2004) is upset when the FBI cannot pass on the information from his laptop. (I believe that I met Rowley on the Skyway at a coffee bar when I was living in downtown Minneapolis 1997-2003.) Massoud is assassinated in a bombing in Afghanistan on Sept. 9, and there is suspicion that this is the beginning of the end. The last forty minutes recreate that morning more effectively than was done in either of the two major theatrical releases this year. O’Neill has gone to work in the South Tower, and tries to scuttle the people out of the building in the 17 minutes before it is hit, although there are many reports that people were told not to leave. He dies when he is trying to go back in to rescue people when the building implodes.  

The movie was followed with a special segment of ABC Primetime Live. 

Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon (20^th Century Fox, 2002, 100 min, TV, dir. Daniel Percival) was shown on FX again on Jan 2, 2005. The network prefaces the movies with a disclaimer that the film is for “entertainment” only and is fictitious, reminding us of Orson Wells and his “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in the 1930s. This film is a chilling docudrama that shows what could have happened had a terrorist infected himself with a Russian strain of smallpox and circulated in New York City on April 1, 2002. (That’s the day my site was hacked!)  For about 100 days the geometric progression is relentless (as are the control measures leading to martial law) until it relents on July 10 (my birthday!)  The government has to dilute its vaccine supply by 6:1 and now, we are told, there is much more vaccine so this would not happen now (in 2005). The terrorist turns out to be a lone fanatic who poisons himself in the NYC subway tunnels, but leaves a key to his apartment with a Bible pointing to an apocalyptic prophesy in Ezekiel. How the terrorist got the strain from Russia is not explained. However, we know that during the Cold War the Russians had plans to cover us with bio-weapons after a nuclear exchange (and we probably had the same plans.)  The epidemic spreads worldwide, and in Africa almost all the HIV-positive cases die. Some of the narrative focuses on one American family living in London; it gets quarantined, and then the family gets a late dilute vaccine. The young adult or late teen boy (John?? Not credited on IMDB) is documenting the epidemic on his camcorder. Unfortunately, his vaccine does not take. The results are soon tragic. One lesson from all of this: don’t take your freedom for granted!