9/11
9/11
2002, 120 min
By Gedeon, Jules Naudet and James Hanlon
$20
Amazon
Netflix rental
In the summer of 2001, French filmmakers Gedeon and Jules Naudet began working on a profile of a rookie firefighter in New York City. They spent hundreds of hours filming an energetic probie named Tony Benetatos at a firehouse in lower Manhattan. It all was pretty standard, snoozy stuff: cooking meals, cleaning trucks, aligning boots. Then came the morning of September 11, when the company received a call to investigate a gas leak near the World Trade Center. Jules went on the call, heard a roar from above, snapped his camera skyward, and filmed the first plane striking Tower One. What follows was two hours of pandemonium, as the firefighters race to the scene, establish a command center and then watch all hell break loose. The most chilling part of the extraordinary 9/11 is how it captures the human element of a tragedy that is still unimaginable in its scope. Particularly eerie is the firefighter's slow realization that this is one blaze they won't put out. That's set against the steady and unnerving background sound of the bodies of tower jumpers smashing through the ground-floor atrium. Observes one firefighter: "How bad must it have been up there if the better option was to jump?"
-- James Daly