I have watched a lot of these kind of documentaries. About 9/11, plane crashes, ships sinking, buildings collapsing, earthquakes, post disaster scenarios, movies, TV shows. From pretty much all over the world from places where free journalism is still possible. This is a disaster documentary that feels like a missed opportunity. It's not really about the disaster. It's not about how exactly people survived, what they did, how some died, what happened at what time and where. It's about talking heads talking into the camera 20 years after the event in a very slow pace in a melodramatic fashion. And the editing slows it all down even further. So basically we have a few recordings of the events. It's 2001 so the camera recordings are not great quality and you needed to work with cameras for a living or be very interested in it to have a camera there ready to film. It's not like 2022 where everyone has a phone and 10% of people can record HD in seconds after taking out their phone. So they found some of the characters that feature in the few videos and they get to tell their stories while we see them for about 5 seconds on video. But really with the time they took to tell these stories you could legit have had maybe 50% to 100% more stories. It's so slow-paced and dry. It's 20 years after the event so largely its older people talking about stuff they barely remember. Memories fade. Yet there is not a single 3D recreation of anything. Not a single illustration or cartoon explaining all those complicated structures and buildings. We just have to imagine how it all looked and hope we are sorta right. But you can't even know for sure if people making it out of a building saved their lives of not because we don't know what happened outside what they tell us. We have a lot of people saying they went into a nearby building while the towers were falling down and barely made it out alive. But did they save themselves? Would they have been buried in concrete dust if they had just stayed outside near the towers? We get zero examples of that happening here. They say so, but since nothing is recreated it's hard to blindly believe them. There is another guy who was helped out of a nearby partly collapsed building. He says his life was saved by a fireman. Yet again we don't learn about what happened to that building. Did it keep standing or did the area where he was at collapse later on? This is kinda important when you give this guy 25 minutes screen time to very slowly tell his story. Many of these stories are interesting enough, but it's a huge logistical mess. Imagine if Tham Luang cave rescue documentaries just had sad people talking into the camera and then some shots outside the cave to add some visual aid. No one would watch it. We want to know what actually happened. There is a fireman who gets like 40 minutes screen time and unfortunately he is an extremely boring narrator. I have never seen anyone talk this slowly before. It's like 60 words per minute. It's unbearable slow. I get that he was there, but giving him this much time makes me sleepy when he is talking. It's painfully boring.
This documentary is a "respect the victims" project where everything is made sad and slow to create a sad gloomy atmosphere. It's a "remember the day" project. But for everyone wanting to re-experience the event it fails.
I also didn't like the R rated stuff. They could have edited out 5 minutes and made this accessible to teens and people who want to avoid this stuff. But instead they made it full-on R rated. So it will leave many with a feeling of disgust. It's nothing visual, but it's quite repulsive.
This is for people who have a great need to feel sad about 9/11. For New Yorkers who have some relation to the event and want to watch this in respect. Gloomy, slow, about death and destruction. But if you want to learn about what happened and how it all fit together only the first 2 episodes are for you. There are often no times given, locations remain unclear, and you just have to feel this stuff to experience any of it as older people tell you what they experienced. If you are unconnected to any one narrator you feel bored. They are not trying to make it interesting, but rather try to make it respectful. The pacing is painful. The first few episodes are acceptable though.
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