The Towers really do loom over The Looming Tower. They stand in the distance as John O’Neill, the FBI’s chief counterterrorism agent, complains to a colleague that the Bureau’s director slept through a nationally broadcast interview with Osama bin Laden, a sure sign that “we’re running out of time.” They show up again as he rides the train into Manhattan the night al Qaeda simultaneously blew up the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, as he calls his best Arabic-speaking agent Ali Soufan to tell him “now it begins.” The presence of the Twin Towers is a commonplace in pre-9/11 period pieces, and of course they appear in countless films made before the attacks with little or no fanfare, a simple marker that the characters have woken up in the city that never sleeps — hell, I watched The Money Pit the other night and there they were in the opening credits, a recognizable Manhattan landmark meant to establish contrast with the bucolic, disintegrating suburban mansion Tom Hanks and Shelley Long were about to fall down in a lot. But their presence takes on extra heft in The Looming Tower. Only here do they loom over a man who dedicated his career to thwarting terrorist attacks, quit when bureaucratic infighting made his job impossible, then died mere weeks into his private-sector career as a security consultant when the World Trade Center collapsed on top of him. He was right, and it killed him.
I’m covering The Looming Tower for Decider, beginning with my review of the series premiere. It’s a pretty straightforward show as far as this one hour of it is concerned, but that’s probably the best way to play this. While I’ve read reviews saying the moment for this treatment of this material has passed, since it focuses on the American intelligence community exclusively rather than treating al Qaeda’s leaders and forerunners as co-protagonists the way the book did, I’m curious to see if it can transform itself into something that does speak to the present moment after all. A show about FBI, CIA, and DoD morons having a pissing contest while people die is probably more useful to us at this point than one about Islamist extremism anyway.
Tags: decider, reviews, the looming tower, TV, TV reviews