DRAMA CALL PAYS OFF
Adapted from a nonfiction tome, ‘The Looming Tower’ traces US failure in the events of 9/11, writes
After winning the streaming sweepstakes last year with its Emmy-nabbing dystopian Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu is once again bringing out the big guns for its new 10-part political drama series The Looming Tower. Moving from projections of the future to an analysis of America’s all- too-recent past, the show is adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 nonfiction tome about the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the infighting between intelligence agencies in the ’90s that contributed to the failure of the US to prevent them, allowing for the rise of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
The show is produced by Wright, documentary director Alex Gibney and Capote and Foxcatcher writer Dan Futterman, who have opted for dramatisation rather than a multi-part documentary. This decision pays off handsomely thanks to stellar performances from Jeff Daniels and Peter Sarsgaard, who represent the differing counterterrorism policies of the FBI and CIA respectively.
BOOZING, WOMANISING HERO
Daniels plays John O’Neill, the boozing, womanising, foul-mouthed head of New York’s FBI Counterterrorism Unit “I-49”. He’s a morally conflicted Catholic in his private life who in spite of his many flaws is presented as the hero of the story. O’Neill was the man who rightly believed that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on US soil but was hampered in his attempts to do anything about it by intelligence-sharing failures and bureaucratic squabbling between his agency and the CIA.
Saarsgard is the pretentious, arrogant and deeply territorial Martin Schmidt, head of the Agency’s “Alec Station”, who believes that only the CIA is capable of fighting potential threats and advocates for the carpet bombing of Afghanistan and the taking out of Bin Laden.
O’Neill warns that this will only embolden jihadists to take up Al Qaeda’s cause in greater numbers and as history has shown us, he was correct — drone strikes, the killing of Bin Laden and too many I’m an oldschool guy so I used to download it from U-Torrent and I watched all five seasons in a week – it had me hooked.
that got me was that I saw people who looked like me and it was the first time that I had seen black culture represented so honestly. It’s the one thing I look forward to year in and year out. It’s well written and I love how they’ve managed to keep me hooked for eight years. The mainstream stuff scares me a little.
I’m watching for reference for a pitch. I generally give any new show 10 minutes to hook me. It’s a cutthroat world in the streaming game so you’ve gotta be good in the first 10 minutes. civilian casualties in the war on terror ultimately led to the creation of ISIS, a more bloodthirsty and brutal jihadi army than even Bin Laden might have imagined.
DRAMATIC IRONY
The real O’Neill — and this is not a spoiler to those who remember the story or have read the book — eventually left the FBI and was killed while working as head of security at the World Trade Centre on September 11. That dramatic irony provides a strong source of empathy for his characterisation that Daniels uses to his advantage. He’s also ably assisted by Tahar Rahim, who plays Ali Soufan, a Muslim Lebanese-American agent who becomes O’Neill’s protégé and is driven by his animosity towards what he sees as the perversion of his religion by extremists.
The show flashes between Soufan and Schmidt’s testimony to the now infamous Senate hearings of 2004 and the events which unfolded in agency offices and AlQaeda camps in the 1990s, when the organisation and its leader began to make a name for themselves as the masterminds of attacks on the US Embassy in Nairobi and the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen.
Gibney and his co-producers allow the show to slowly burn and move from what seems to be a one-sided focus on the American agents towards a more bottomdown examination of some of the characters on the other side. These characters include high-ranking Al-Qaeda members and finally, the hijackers themselves.
There are also memorable cameos by Alec Baldwin as cigar-puffing, dickswinging CIA director George Tenet and Michael Stuhlbarg (who seems to be in everything worth mentioning these days) as Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke.
With subtle but accurate period detail and memorable performances, the show evokes the New York of the ’90s that while still recent in memory seems so very far away in so many other ways, not least because of the events that loom over it and to which it makes its grippingly inevitable and tragic journey.
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LThe Looming Tower is available on Amazon Prime. There’s nothing left to say about American culture and so the next frontier is elsewhere. Black Panther is doing so well only because it’s fresh and exploring a culture outside of America. Our distributors are still cautious and tend to wait to see what the international trends are and follow them instead of leading the way. I made a movie a couple of years ago and people said: “Oh, you don’t have a single white person in the movie,” and that was a talking point. Come on, guys. It’s based on an African proverb which says: “The falling of a yellow leaf is a warning to the green ones.” So that’s taking up my every waking thought.
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