To me, this movie is perfection.

An Exercise In Nonsense

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

On August 1, 1966, a sniper climbed to the observation deck of the clock tower at the University of Texas - Austin. From there, he randomly shot and killed fourteen people and injured thirty-two others. The story is retold in this film which is mostly a documentary but also a drama where some events are re-enacted in rotoscopic animation.The shooting spree lasted about an hour and a half which is close to the length of this movie. As events seem to be happening in real time, this film succeeds in having the effect of a thriller - at least to those of us who did not know the final outcome of the tragedy.Director Keith Maitland has made some unique choices that pay off fabulously. The available footage is compelling; the use of animation to continue the story (where footage is not available) is also very effective.This movie is more powerful than most documentaries in that it places viewers in the moral dilemma of some of the bystanders: what does one do upon seeing someone wounded who is in clear view from the tower? While helping is the right thing to do, how does one do so without risking getting shot?Once the main narrative of the event is complete, the post-script takes on a life of its own. It includes interviews with some of the survivors, police officers, and observers including archived interviews of those who have died since the event. This satisfies a curiosity especially when they speak openly of the traumatic memories followed by a healing process.Maitland has deliberately excluded much information about the assassin with an exception being a photo which generates many mixed feelings. The inclusion of a commentary by the revered Walter Cronkite is also very well chosen especially considering the many mass shootings that have happened in the half-century since. This is a superior documentary.

I went into this movie blind, not knowing what to expect. I love the fact that this movie gets straight into the action.It doesn't even take time to present you with the characters. Then, of course, the film is animated.Amazing choice I think.The animation was gorgeous.It was like a stop motion, but not a stop motion.The editing, especially in the first 50 minutes or so, the editing is flawless.Also, the movie is very emotional, and can make you cry and laugh in the same moment.The pacing of the film is also almost perfect.Also, it didn't focus on the killer what so ever.The whole movie was about the victims and the heroes.It is one of the most strongly emotional movies I have seen.In my opinion, this is the best documentary of 2016.I strongly recommend it.

TOWER is an important movie for all the right reasons. It is an artistic feast; a cinematic marvel that recreates a tragedy with a simple beauty without falling into the tropes of documentary filmmaking. This is not a documentary, rather it's more of a non-fiction retelling that casts actors to read lines in place of the real people. It recounts a school shooting that happened long before memories of Columbine - on a sprawling Texas campus where a sniper took a town hostage and murdered a total of 17 victims (including an unborn child) and shooting a total of 49 people. In a time when mass shootings have become a standard scroll on the nightly news, this was a new kind of crime. It only seems fitting that the movie uses a new form of craft to tell it.It was the summer of 1966 on the sweltering campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Summer courses were just beginning, and the college town surrounding the buildings were bustling with excited youth and students. It was just after noon. From nowhere, people recall hearing "pops" and suddenly the air was filled with targeted bullets, first striking down a pregnant woman and her boyfriend in the stone plaza outside the central clock tower. Soon after, a boy on his bike was shot several blocks away. Chaos ensued.On a day when the top news was going to be little more than the heat, here was suddenly a national emergency that gripped the country. A local news director hopped in his car and broadcast the scene from a portable radio. His voice was heard all over America. From the clock tower, the rumors that a sniper was preying on those below with no regard and no sense. Why don't more people talk about this tragedy today?The film is designed to be a documentary (although I would argue it doesn't fall into that specific genre for a variety of reasons) with talking heads of students and police officers explaining what happened. We know they are actors, and their accounts strike us as surprisingly modern in expression and tone. The rotoscoped faces keep the past at a safe distance, and it's almost easy for the audience to distance themselves from the horror that actually happened here. Through black and white recreations and grainy archival footage, the film crafts a landscape of southern comfort and familiarity with those living nearby.There is a moment like a bombshell midway through the film, when we suddenly cut from the illustrated actor to an actual aged woman, continuing her story without a moment's hesitation. This woman (now in her 60's or so) is one of the survivors: the woman who lost her unborn child at the hand of the gunman. It's a revelation - splicing the animation with the real, creating a moment that is all the more impactful by bridging that historical and visual gap. Now we understand that these actors are not reading from a script... They are telling the actual words by those who survived it.There are beautiful moments that are beyond words - like when a red-headed woman rushed to the aid of this pregnant woman even though she remained completely vulnerable to the shooter. They begin a conversation to keep their minds off the terror and carnage. Another moment when a couple of students act heroically in order to save victims from the slow death that awaited them. They run out in the face of danger and carry victims to safety. This was a time that separated the heroes amongst us, and there were unbelievably brave people that were caught in the midst of it all.By the end, "Tower" became a movie that commented on the string of recent shootings, the prevalence of violence in our culture, our unwillingness to stop it... There have been several movies made about the ideas of school violence and mass shootings. I recently re-watched "Elephant" which is a great Gus Van Sant film that recreates a Columbine-like shooting and yet does nothing to answer the simple question of "why?" "Tower" is great not because deals with the same question, rather it adds to it: why can't we stop this from happening?

This film is really an extraordinary achievement, in both the animation genre and the documentary genre. This could have been just like many other documentaries where talking heads are intercut with archival footage. By using animation, the film is able to create re- enactments that play around with memory and affective experience in a way that wouldn't be able to be done without animation. It's able to be a clear documentary while still telling a cohesive, linear narrative with many main characters and different perspectives at its core. This deserves to be seen and widely acclaimed, its achievement in not just how much of an emotional impact it has but also in various aspects of filmmaking are enough to recommend this to fans of quality cinema.