The 9/11 Commission Report
September. 05,2006 RIndependent writer-director Leigh Slawner helms this chilling dramatization of the findings laid out in the best-selling 9/11 Commission Report, a document that sought to analyze the circumstances surrounding coordinated terrorist attacks against American civilians on Sept 11 2001.
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I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
The 9/11 Commission Report (2006) * (out of 4) The Asylum, the studio best known for really bad and really cheap "mockbusters" decided to deliver something straight in this docudrama based on the commission report that was released on the September 11, 2001 attacks. Leigh Scott wrote and directed this picture and I think the majority of the blame has to go to the screenplay. I'm really not sure what type of story they were trying to get across but it's an incredible mess that never makes too much sense. Trying to get all of the pre-9/11 stuff into a low-budget, 84-minute movie was probably a bad idea to begin with but it certainly doesn't help that the execution is so poor. The story is pretty much impossible to follow but even worse is the really bad dialogue. As bad as the dialogue is, it doesn't help that the performances range from bland to bad. I mean, the story is bad, the dialogue is bad and the performances are bad so with all of this considered it's really easy to see why the film tanked. Whenever you're trying to deliver a political thriller, having all of those elements not work is just leading to a disaster. I can't say how many times we were supposed to be caught up in this tense political thriller yet the dialogue they were saying seemed to have been written by a ten-year-old and the performances saying it appeared to be from a high school play. There's just no way around the fact that this film really shouldn't have been made or at least not in the fashion that it was. The "Jason Bourne" style of filmmaking with the camera just sliding around everywhere also doesn't work here. I'm sure it was meant to draw us into the action but it fails. In the end, this film is just bad all around and if you're going to watch something bad from The Asylum then it's best to get something that's also campy.
We'll never know The Truth about 9/11. And this shoddy movie proves it.I recently watched a YouTube report claiming there were no planes involved in the Twin Towers' destruction; that all the news programs were supposedly provided with same-angle shots of the Towers from a mysterious source (probably the gubmint?), and in that provided footage CGI planes were substituted for real-life MISSILES which actually hit the towers....It's a compelling video, and though I am not a Wacko Conspiracy Theorist per se, I am still not sure myself whether actual planes hit anything that day (the Towers, the Shanksville field, the Pentagon) - because there is no plane wreckage available. (And what about those infamous "black boxes"? None recovered.) A million other theories abound, all of them courting a droplet of Truth awash in an ocean of speculation. But you'll drown in malarkey before you find anything truthful or worth speculating about in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT, a no-budget movie that is trying to close the barn door after all the horses and jihadists have escaped.Writer-director Leigh Scott is obviously a concerned American citizen who wanted to enlighten audiences on what the 560-page report might reveal. It would help if his movie had actors, instead of a guy who looks like David Duchovny, a chick who looks like Gina Gershon, a guy who thinks he's Russell Crowe and another guy who I'm pretty sure is trying hard to be Sean Bean. It would help if his camera operator didn't have Parkinson's; if the lighting director wasn't trying to save on electricity; it would help if his editor didn't have Attention Deficit Disorder, or if the soundtrack wasn't some tuneless new world order esoterica; and the looping should have probably been inserted when people were actually moving their mouths.We can't even call this propaganda. It's too funny. And by funny, I mean unwatchable.You can't squeeze an issue this complex into a two-hour film, but Leigh Scott tries anyway, including all those sexy catch-phrases we've grown inured to: bin Laden's intent to attack, purchasing weapons from Somalia, non-aggression agreement with Iraq, Mussawi attending flight school, weapons of mass destruction...The problem is: we know it's all retrospect, so every discussion the concerned intelligence operatives have with each other reeks of fake hindsight all crammed into a neat conversation. Like contrived reverse engineering, everything pertinent is mentioned succinctly so that we can shake our heads in wonder at how incompetently all these branches of government screwed up.There's a ludicrous interrogation scene with a lubricious bimbo beating up on a guy with tomato sauce on his face. Now - that would be considered torture if most guys didn't consider it a turn-on.The tagline is: "What if the attack could have been stopped?" By this movie's account - and, we presume, according to the Commission Report - the CIA and other underground agencies were all set to capture bin Laden and didn't. Everyone involved with the "terrorism" reports (you mean you actually read these reports?) is so concerned we just want to slap them for their bad acting.Yet the whole story goes so much deeper than the banal soundbytes the negligent Ku Bush Klan foisted on the American people after 9/11. We now know that even capturing bin Laden before the 9/11 attack would not have changed or achieved anything - the wheels were in motion with or without that Taliban figurehead whose involvement was the possible figment of someone's fevered imagination to unite America against a common enemy. Contrary to popular belief "they" didn't "attack us." As Ron Paul tried to elucidate, it was a case of Middle Eastern blowback - "they" were so sick of America planting their infidel feet "over there" that they brought the war "over here." So though George W. Death likes to tout the nonsensical, "We're fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here," in reality "Because we're Over There, the fight has been brought Over Here." The 9/11 attack was not so much about the intricate planning of terrorists, as it was the gross negligence of the Bush administration, who we know (without the probing of Commissions) had all the intel from the Clinton administration onwards; information about terrorist cells reaching critical mass and their intent to cause chaos. But the Oil Idiot of Texas, who refused to read his Daily Briefings and would rather vacation at his Crawford ranch than spend one extra day at work, abrogated the duty he swore an oath to perform - protect the American public.And then the scum who called himself president used the attacks brought about by his negligence as a political hammer against his own dumbed-down countryfolk to score a second term, shred the American Constitution and take America into a Fake War on the basis of a lie (WMD), with a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Strangely enough, the movie never treads near the Ku Bush Klan, offering no opinion or judgment, Leigh Scott wanting to remain neutral. Tell that to the raped and pillaged hundreds of thousands in the Fake War on Terror in Iraq.Out of pure coincidence, I realized I was watching this DVD while wearing my "Bush lied. Thousands Died." t-shirt.
Am I the only one who thought the point of this film was the graphic violence? I knew nothing about Leigh Scott when I rented it, and would not have done so if I had known that most of his previous films were horror films. I am not into that at all, I was just expecting an informative docudrama of the 9/11 report.Instead, I got an almost incomprehensible, violent movie. The only good thing about it for me, was that it made me want to read the report, to figure out what the heck this movie was about.I wrote this because I am shocked that we have become so immune to violence in films and on TV, that it was not even worth commenting on by the bloggers whose reviews that I read.
When you see the cover of this DVD it would appear to be a big time picture, but looks can be deceiving. Here are some gripes I had about this film:1) The video quality appears to be something from an entry level consumer video camera. 2) Shots taken on the streets have massive camera bobbing and make you feel sick and unable to focus. 3)The audio almost never syncs with the video. In fact sometimes it's a full second off. 4) The volume must often be turned way up to hear certain scenes. 5) The actors dialog always seems muffled. 6) There are no subtitles to understand extremely muffled scenes which makes it hard to follow the plot. 7) Even shots taken from a stationary point have an unsteady camera view. They never bothered buying a tripod I suppose.As for the quality of the story... I really can't give that an honest opinion because I simply couldn't catch it all due to the above technical flaws. I really wish it had subtitles it would be possible to follow.All-in-all: Rent something else. This is too difficult to watch. The parts you can actually hear seem interesting, but you just can't follow most of it without subtitles --which aren't present.