My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Tuesday, June 26, 2018

A good but flawed series on 9/11

The Hulu 10-part series The Looming Tower will hold everyone's interest because of our unending fascination with the horror of the attacks of 9/11. This series focuses on the back story from the POV of American intelligence, beginning w/ the attack on the embassy in Nairobi, then onto the attack on the Cole in Yemen, finally to the 9/11 attacks. The film avoids the gruesome, to its credit - this is a story about the malfunction of government at the apex. The premise - based on a nonfiction book by Lawrence Wright - is that the CIA had a lot of intelligence that could possibly have stopped the 9/11 attacks but the agency kept the information secret, in particular from the FBI, which was working the same materials. The assumption is that if the 2 agencies had worked together instead of becoming snarled in personal rivalries and ego trips, they could have found the terrorists in th US before the attacks. That's all possibly true, but the series is told entirely from the FBI perspective - presumably, because the feds were willing to speak at length w/ Wright and the spooks were not. If the lack of cooperation is the theme, nobody will miss it: The writers hammer home these points repeatedly. They also make John O'Neill, head of the FBI counter-terrorism unit, a hero (if not a saint - he is deeply flawed) - the only one who's right, all the time. The writers/producers try to build in a human element to the story as we follow the love lives of O'neill and of his top field agent, a Lebanese-American fluent in Arabic. The writing in these back stories is so bad that at one point M and I looked at each other thinking: Who writes this shit? So, yes, this series is good, despite some really lame dialog (hint: repeated use of the variants on the word "fucking" does not make for good tough-guy dialog), but it could have been better at 5 or 6 episodes with less back story and with more faith in viewers: The CIA isn't cooperating. They're bad guys. We get it. Let's move on.

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