Culture

'The Looming Tower' brings 9/11 mishaps to TV

March 01, 2018 20:34·
Jeff Daniels in

Jeff Daniels in"The Looming Tower. Hulu

The Looming Tower is executive produced by Dan Futterman (Showrunner), Alex Gibney, Lawrence Wright, Craig Zisk, and Adam Rapp. (O'Neill is married with kids but has a mistress, Soufan's girlfriend is frustrated that he can never give her details about his work, and so on.) It's probably too much to expect an American-financed production to put itself into the minds of the enemy, to make the drama richer and confound our sympathies, but it's still a pity that The Looming Tower is mostly unable or unwilling to try doing this, aside from occasional, sensationally effective moments, such as an NSA-ordered drone strike on an Afghanistan training camp that kills nearly everyone in the place, including young children who were shown to be guilty of nothing but being related to extremists. Sometimes Tower works this tension naturally, but at others it's a bit too blunt, as in the multiple shots that include the World Trade Center literally looming over the characters. It ensures, and this may well be the stamp of Gibney's documentarian sensibility, that the series doesn't lose the forest for the trees, letting us see how interagency scuffles become fatal oversights.

It's a star-studded adaptation, with big, blustery performances from the likes of Jeff Daniels, Peter Sarsgaard and Alec Baldwin, that manages to tackle a huge part of American culture without getting hammy or tasteless.

Hulu's latest original series, "The Looming Tower", is a gripping political drama of the events leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

As I say in my review above, even with some unnecessary fictionalized steps, there are numerous points of nostalgia in the wonderfully designed series for the era that thought it was catching the wind but got lost in vital missed opportunities to stop the evil of Osama bin Laden. While the new 9/11 espionage thriller miniseries The Looming Tower likely won't have anywhere near the pop-culture impact of its Emmy-winning counterpart, it does touch on themes and topics that are just as timely, ranging from the consequences of America's power games in other parts of the world to the costs of inter-agency squabbling within the USA government.

Today it airs as a television mini-series, narrating the power struggle between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose refusal to cooperate may have prevented the world's greatest superpower from failing to stop 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers training at USA flight schools and smashing passenger jets into NY and Washington, killing almost 3,000 people.

WS: I really hope people start to ask questions and that they'll pick up Larry's book and that people will want to investigate that period of time more.

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Daniels embodies the role of O'Neill, who was as polarizing a figure as he was steadfast in his dogged pursuit against global terror. "This is a character who is driven, a person who elicits only two reactions: love and hate", Wright says. The Looming Tower is a Legendary Television production for Hulu in the U.S.

"So much time passed that young people now don't know what that event was".

The series is also a chance to revisit O'Neill, not as the failure his obituary painted, but as a prescient and astute - albeit still highly flawed - individual who "would go to the mat for his guys", according to Daniels. "So quickly these things recede into history, and I realized they didn't have a narrative about how we became the country we are now because of what happened on 9/11, and because of what happened after".

Rolling Stone magazine's Rob Sheffield highlights the fact that the show harks back to a more "innocent" time in United States recent history - "these characters take the Clinton era's peace and prosperity for granted, no matter how tuned in they are to terrorist threats" - and describes the show as "a first-rate procedural". "And they would fight for us", Wright noted. "They were very helpful so I had a pretty good painting of what he was", he explained.

The Looming Tower debuts its first three episodes on Hulu Feb. 28; subsequent episodes will bow weekly.

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