Why Hollywood still hasn’t made a “great movie” about September 11th

With the commemoration of one of the saddest dates for the USA – September 11th, the Hollywood Reporter addressed the question of why “a great movie about that tragedy hasn’t been made yet”, concluding that “there should be one”.

“For 25 years, artists and audiences have been trying to bring the attacks that occurred that day to the screen. But something is still missing. You are, I’m sure, a moral person. So you may think that no one should ever make a movie about September 11. The sadness of that day is immeasurable. Its consequences still reverberate through our cruel world. It would be respectful to leave the subject alone. But I love movies too much to think about it logically,” writes Darren French for The Hollywood Reporter.

He recalls that before the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the deadliest attack on American soil was the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“Thanks to Hollywood, we also know that Pearl Harbor was the place where Burt Lancaster kissed Deborah Kerr, as well as where Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett made love. ‘From Here to Eternity’ is, of course, a better doomed love story than Pearl Harbor, although neither film would make a particularly good history lesson,” the journalist concludes.

“But there is something healing about turning real tragedy into emotional spectacle. Great cinema has emerged from historical nightmares: the bloodshed of D-Day, epidemics of racial violence, waves of political assassinations. For a long time, the most successful film ever was the story of an iceberg that killed more than a thousand people. And if you’re going to object that ‘Titanic’ was made 85 years after the ship sank, I would remind you that some of us believe that Ari Aster has already made the first great Covid film with Eddington,” adds French.

“The 9/11 movie has never had a lasting cultural impact. It’s just strange because – and I swear this is true, as wrong as it sounds – American audiences have long wanted entertainment that would remind them of 9/11,” he believes.

Two docu-dramas based on true events, “United 93” and “World Trade Center,” made solid profits in 2006. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the former was “legendarily difficult to watch,” but rituals of traumatic suffering were big business back then.

“Kathy Bigelow won an Oscar for the war fiction ‘The Hurt Locker’, and then earned another $80 million following the real, or at least near-real, search for Osama bin Laden in the film ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’ Critics always appreciated Spike Lee’s ’25th Hour’ for its filming at ‘Ground Zero.’ Academy voters loved the pathetic ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ so much that they gave it a Best Picture nomination,” French recalls.

He points out that in the same years, on the small screen, “24” and “Lost” had plane crashes in their premiere episodes. “Lost” co-creator JJ Abrams had a particular obsession with 9/11 in his days as a prodigious young auteur — his second series, “Fringe,” ended its first season by setting it in the alternate reality of the South Tower.

“But you don’t have to stop at vague allegories and contemporary fantasies. In 2004, Michael Moore’s politically charged film Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed more than $100 million in the U.S. It was the highest-grossing documentary in history. What people always underestimate when they talk about the 2000s is how many of us didn’t go to the movies to feel good. Yet there were very few serious attempts to chronicle the day itself or what followed. At one point, the final twist of Remember Me was that 9/11 killed Robert Pattinson,” French writes.

“One explanation is that the attacks were already a multimedia spectacle: something that transcended film due to the sheer volume of television footage, perhaps even the first global meme. If you were alive then, you watched the towers fall over and over again,” says a Hollywood Reporter journalist.

“‘From Here to Eternity’ comes to us from a vanished world, where most people barely knew what Pearl Harbor looked like before seeing the Hollywood version. It was the second highest-grossing film in 1953, twelve years after the attacks. Twelve years after 9/11, the second highest-grossing film of 2013 was ‘Iron Man 3,'” he writes.

“This may sound like the typical grumbling of a sullen film critic: Hollywood used to make real movies, before it started churning out superhero junk. But the third ‘Iron Man’ is the one with the Mandarin, a terrorist modeled after bin Laden, overseeing a series of suicide attacks. He is, of course, a fraud – an actor hiding a secret alliance between a corporate powerbroker and a corrupt vice president,” French adds.

“Yet, you see the paradox – September 11th has literally been almost completely absent from the movies even when it was figuratively everywhere. I think that’s exactly what’s missing: a director who could combine the literal and the figurative – the authenticity of the facts with the vitality of the fantasy, the unimaginable suffering depicted with furious cinematic spectacle,” the journalist believes, adding that it sounds like “an impossible combination, especially after Adam McKay tried something similar so badly with the film “Vice.”

“But this is the kind of mythic-tragic entertainment that Oliver Stone has been creating for a decade, from Salvador and Platoon to JFK and Nixon. The director has tried to approach the subject of 9/11 several times, making the bleak ‘World Trade Center’ and the disappointingly mediocre George W. Bush biopic. Neither of those films has reached the fevered controversy of his golden period. Was it all simply too fresh, even for the great provocateur?” French asks.

Another question the journalist asks is whether the American audience is still too close to the topic.

“I think time will bring clarity – or maybe it will just create a younger generation ready to take off a few band-aids. “There are successful filmmakers today who don’t remember 9/11, and kids who flock to see dark A24 movies and ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ don’t remember that the first trailer for the first Spider-Man movie ended with a web strung between the World Trade Center towers. Today’s most successful Republicans despise the Republicans of 2001; today’s most modern Democrats despise the Democrats of 2001,” he says.

“The trend of harsh truths is once again making its way onto the screen, and we’ll soon find out if audiences want every hideous technological tyrant to get their own dark epic. September 11 is one of the most horrific moments in human history. Avoiding the subject in the name of respect is dangerously close to ignorance. Movies, good and bad, create collective memories. There are things we should never forget,” French says.

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