‘Looming Tower’s long shadow
Hulu series tracks the lead-up to 9/11. Preview,
You already know the devastating ending to The Looming Tower.
Hulu’s new limited series (first three episodes stream Feb. 28, others released weekly on Wednesdays, is based on a non-fiction book by journalist Lawrence Wright, who chronicled the lead-up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how infighting between the FBI and the CIA may have enabled them.
It’s a star-studded adaptation, with big, blustery performances from the likes of Jeff Daniels, Peter Sarsgaard and Alec Baldwin, that manages to tackle a huge part of American culture without getting hammy or tasteless. The sharply written and acted series keeps you hooked, even though you know the story ends horrifically.
Created by Dan Futterman ( In Treatment), documentarian Alex Gibney ( Going Clear) and Wright, Tower is told primarily from the point of view of beleaguered, blunt-spoken FBI chief John O’Neill (Daniels) and his protégé, agent Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim), beginning in 1998 with the bombings of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
As the series tells it, O’Neill is the only man who takes the threat from alQaeda seriously, a stance that makes him seem nutty at the time, but viewers with the benefit of hindsight know to be prescient. Working at times in direct opposition to the FBI is Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), the antagonistic and smug head of the CIA’s Alec Station, which is also investigating Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
A series that spends so much time on interoffice squabbles could have turned out dry and dull (or worse, disrespectfully dramatized the run-up to a terrorist attack), but Tower‘ s writers keep it moving at a quick clip and paint intriguing portraits of the men and few women tasked with protecting the nation. Daniels’ O’Neill is a fascinating character study: He’s a passionate patriot with an unconventional personal life and few friends. Rahim, a French actor, is strong as Ali, one of the FBI’s only Muslim, Arabic-speaking agents, battling discrimination as he tries to investigate.
Tower often feels like the platonic ideal of a streaming series, with all the right ingredients that keep viewers watching in one furious binge. (It’s a shame Hulu isn’t releasing the series all at once.) Using the period story as com- mentary on the way we live now, it’s taut and enthralling, with plenty of serious men in serious meetings yelling at each other about what they believe in.
Many streaming series have bloated lengths and extraneous subplots, but almost every scene in Tower feels vital, even if it’s occasionally guilty of being a bit too on the nose. What’s looming, as you watch FBI and CIA bureaucrats bicker and field agents scramble, is one of the largest American massacres, an event that fundamentally changed a country. Sometimes Tower works this tension naturally, but at others it’s a bit too blunt, as in the multiple shots that include the World Trade Center literally looming over the characters.
In its softer-touch moments, the series excels at creating a sense of existential dread, offering answers to questions we wish we didn’t have to ask, and finding something new to say about a story we all already know.