The films that take stock of cultural memory
In John Boorman’s masterpiece Excalibur, which vivifies England’s bellicose foundational heritage, the magician Merlin advises, “Remember it well. For it is the doom of men that they forget.” That warning resounds during this year’s 9/11 remembrance when no current film cultivates that memory a quarter century later.
It takes at least a couple of years for Hollywood to reflect the impact of current events — a custom sped up by digital technological advances — so the historical record was both late and dubious.
To judge by the indifference of contemporary cinema, 9/11 is as unknown as the ceremonial placement given to the body of its organizer, Osama bin Laden. Here’s a 15-film stock-taking to address that lack.
Fahrenheit 911 (2004)
Hollywood’s earliest imprint of 9/11 is found in Michael Moore’s trivializing partisan docu-satire Fahrenheit 911. The three-year lapse revealed the industry’s confusion and inability to make sense of the tragedy while being mindful of a need to assign blame. Moore, who hasn’t yet addressed the Covid lockdown tyrannies, provided a quick, shallow, biased perspective.
War of the Worlds (2005)
Steven Spielberg burst forth with an intense poetic analogy for invasion and devastation that was so powerful, so surreal, some viewers deliberately mistook its vivid political metaphor for escapist entertainment. The painful, bloody tableaux of national chaos and devastation as a father (Tom Cruise) risked everything to protect his family saw us through the dark and cut deep, proving that the response to 9/11 was still raw. Spielberg asked, “Are we still alive?”
Munich (2005)
Spielberg ostensibly re-created the 1972 Olympics massacre but brought the terror home in an evocative summary image of the once-new Twin Towers, now a haunting memory of ongoing political dread and lasting sorrow.
Red Eye (2005)
Wes Craven understood the necessity of addressing terrorist fear with B-movie immediacy — terms worthy of Sam Fuller and Larry Cohen — reminding us that 9/11 was personal.
World Trade Center (2006)
Oliver Stone committed his political consciousness to the human expediencies buried within the rubble of 9/11. It depicted the New York experience on the same level as such WWII dramas as William Wyler’s prestigious Best Years of Our Lives. But Stone added the psychic disturbance of William K. Howard’s little-known When the Lights Go On Again.
United 93 (2006)
Paul Greengrass misconceived Fleet Street tabloid urgency for significance. His re-creation of the terrorist hijacking that ended in Shanksville, Pa., reduced the tragedy to real-time play-by-play, with anonymous actors. Critics lauded it as if approving a eulogy; it now feels irrelevant.
We Are Marshall (2006)
McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol), a music-video populist, found the perfect 9/11 parallel in the 1970 Southern Airways Flight 932 plane crash that killed 75 souls, including 37 players of the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team of Huntington, W.V. Unusual for non-wartime Hollywood, it is movingly existential Americana, a necessary catharsis.
Road to Guantanamo (2006)
Following Britain’s doc tradition, Michael Winterbottom made the first film critical of the U.S. government policy response to 9/11 and sympathetic toward the Afghan detainees (England’s Tipton Three) at the American naval base in Cuba. His reflection was indistinguishable from exploitation — he merely beat leftist Hollywood to the apologetic punch.
Redacted (2007)
Brian De Palma followed suit with a re-creation of the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities. Assuming American blame for 9/11, De Palma’s just-desserts film was a replay of his earlier Vietnam-era dissent. It is both appallingly trendy and guilt-ridden, but its sympathy for GIs is not entirely anti-American.
Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
Errol Morris’s pseudo-investigative Abu Ghraib mockumentary was blatantly anti-American, a contrived pseudo-doc that justified hatred of the U.S. military and its fumbled response to 9/11.
Stop-Loss (2008)
Kimberly Peirce’s home front drama confronted the crises of young American soldiers as cannon fodder deployed in the Iraq War.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Kathryn Bigelow looked skeptically at 9/11’s extended cost, in the risks and fatalities of American soldiers. It’s a somber version of David O. Russell’s superior Gulf War comedy Three Kings.
Green Zone (2010)
Paul Greengrass exploited 9/11 again, this time using the Iraq War (starring Matt Damon in an espionage thriller about weapons of massage destruction). It’s morally easier than a Brit showing respect for the New York equivalent to London’s Blitz.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Bigelow’s war procedural was an “official” version of the bin Laden manhunt headed by a woman (Jessica Chastain). The fusion of feminism, genre tropes, and CIA authorization evaded everything about what 9/11 actually felt like.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016)
Ang Lee brought rare sensibility to the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War, examining the homeland complications experienced by a young veteran (Joe Alwyn) who feels soldierly fidelity to his military comrades and his native folk. A beautifully felt depiction of 9/11’s emotional rather than political aftermath.
***
The filmmakers whose observation of 9/11 best honored that tragedy seem to have moved on, leaving the next generations, disconnected from its significance, to dismiss the event and focus on other political preferences. It’s the films of Spielberg, Stone, McG, and Lee that speak with moral clarity about 9/11 without blurring the distinction between heroes and terrorists. Theirs are the films worth remembering.
