After several years where escapism was the name of the game —top grossers included the “Harry Potter” and “Lord Of The Rings” series and “Pirates Of The Caribbean”— studio blockbusters soon reverted to standard operating procedure. “The Day After Tomorrow,” exactly the kind of destruction-happy disaster movie that many thought that 9/11 had put to an end, was the seventh biggest film of 2004. But more interesting were the big-budget movies that began to be directly influenced by the attacks and their aftermath.
In M. Night Shymalan’s “Signs,” there’s a chilling moment when Abigail Breslin’s character tells her father (Mel Gibson) that the cartoons she’s watching have finished. When he tells her to change the channel, she complains “It’s the same picture on every channel.” The panicked reaction of Gibson and his brother (Joaquin Phoenix) are immediate, inspiring recollections in the audience of a day not too long ago when they also would have found the same footage on every channel.
Another alien invasion picture (it’s not hard to see why that particular trope became popular again, though it’s striking that these new films saw their heroes as ordinary joes, not the presidents and scientists of “Independence Day” —terror and invasion was something that could happen to all of us now), Steven Spielberg’s 2005 update of “War Of The Worlds” is even more explicit in its invocation of the imagery of 9/11. During the initial attack when the tripods lays waste to his New Jersey suburb, Tom Cruise’s Ray flees through the streets as alien lasers vaporize his fellow citizens, turning their bodies into a white ash. By the time he’s able to escape the menace, Ray is chalky-white, covered in the cremated remains of his friends and neighbors, and is appalled when he realizes what the residue is. Here, Spielberg is directly referencing the images of Manhattan residents covered in the dusty ash of the collapsed Twin Towers.
It’s not the only moment where Spielberg invokes 9/11 and the days that followed. In one memorable sequence, Ray and his family take refuge in a house, only to hear cataclysmic sounds from above. They eventually reemerge, expecting to find the aftermath of another tripod attack, but discover instead that the wreck of a plane, including a jet engine, has decimated the neighborhood above. And we also glimpse a noticeboard full of pictures of the missing, a commonplace sight in the days after 9/11. Yet the film doesn’t feel exploitative for the most part: instead, it’s a powerful response to the unimaginable fear and terror, one that takes H.G. Wells’ story and truly contextualizes it for the new era.
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Having spent a few years summoning up the necessary courage, Hollywood united 9/11 and the disaster movie for real less than five years after the event itself, with 2006’s “United 93” and “World Trade Center.” The former is Paul Greengrass’s stripped-down, lower-budget reconstruction of the hijacked flight whose passengers attempted to stand their ground against the terrorists before coming to a tragic end. The latter, directed by Oliver Stone, was a more reassuring melodrama, telling the story of two Port Authority police officers who were pulled from the rubble.
When the trailer for “United 93” first played in cinemas, it was reportedly greeted with cries of “too soon!,” and was even withdrawn from one New York theater entirely following complaints from audience members. But if a studio movie was going to be the first to depict the attacks itself, it was a good thing that it was Greengrass’s picture.
A former documentary maker whose powerful film “Bloody Sunday” had won acclaim a few years before, Greengrass set out to stick to the facts as closely as possible, referring on the DVD commentary to the 9/11 Commission as his “bible” and even going so far as to cast a number of figures who were on duty on the day, like FAA operations manager Ben Sliney. This move is part of a long tradition when it comes to filmmakers seeking authenticity: the pioneering 1945 20th Century Fox docudrama “The House On 92nd Street” was sold on the basis of its realism, including FBI agents played by real-life bureau field officers.
Eschewing movie stars in a bid to avoid any sensationalization (to the complaints of some critics: Andrew Sarris wrote that “the four hijackers were more individualized than the 40 innocent victims”), Greengrass tries to simply relate the events as he believes that they happened, and the result is a gripping and horrifying film told with humanity as well as desperate tension.
But given that we don’t know exactly what happened on board the flight, it’s hard not to feel that a little Hollywood crept into Greengrass’s film. The conclusion, as the passengers attempt to rush the cockpit with a primal roar and what David Denby called the way that “the accumulated dread and grief get released… with the engorged fury of water breaking through a damn,” is a moment of catharsis even when you know that the attempt is doomed. And it earned criticism from some, including Manohla Dargis, who said that “the whole thing plays out very much according to the Hollywood playbook.” She might have had a point —the killing of two of the terrorists, one with an “Irreversible”-esque fire extinguisher, the other with a Schwarzenegger-esque neck slap, offers a blood-letting that feels out of step with the rest of the film, but might have been necessary in terms of making it palatable to a mainstream audience.
Stone’s film, released four months after “United 93,” was much more of a traditional Hollywood melodrama in many ways. We’re given more backstories and flashbacks to the lives of the stricken heroes, more cutaways to their teary families and more of a sense of hope even when things seem to be at its bleakest. Indeed, the film’s marketing seemingly sought to reassure audiences that they weren’t going to get a downbeat movie, the poster billing it as a story of “courage and survival,” the trailer showing a shot of one of the men being pulled out.
And while critics were mostly unimpressed (“Mr. Stone does not share Mr. Greengrass’s clinical, quasi-documentary aesthetic. His sensibility is one of visual grandeur, sweeping emotion and heightened, sometimes overwrought drama,” wrote A.O. Scott), audiences were much more ready to embrace the relative comfort of “World Trade Center” than the more unsparing reportage of “United 93” —Stone’s film took $70 million domestically, well over twice what the earlier film did. “It showed the good that people can do,” one audience member, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, was quoted as saying in the New York Times on the release of “World Trade Center.” “I feel that life has heroes. It’s unlike the one about the plane —that took you and left you devastated.”
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Together, the success of the two movies (with “World Trade Center” being a legit hit, and Greengrass earning an Oscar nomination for “United 93”) seemed to break a taboo regarding 9/11 as subject matter or reference point moving forward. Just a few months after “World Trade Center,” hit comedy “Borat” featured a joke where the main character expressed reluctance to fly to the U.S., “in case the Jews repeat their attack of 9/11.” The following year, Adam Sandler, of all people, starred in a drama, “Reign Over Me,” as a man whose family died in the attacks, while B-movie provocateur Uwe Boll began his movie “Postal” with a shot of the first attack from the perspective of a window washer.
Whereas even a glancing reference to 9/11 might have once made headlines, it became increasingly commonplace and not at all shocking. A filmmaker could make everything from a comedy about incompetent terrorists (Chris Morris’s “Four Lions” uses the attacks as the backdrop) to queasy Oscar bait (Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close”) or could deploy the events as a cheap twist in a Nicholas Sparks-like weepie (Robert Pattinson vehicle “Remember Me”). Both a documentary and a 3D spectacle could recreate a famous wire-walk between the Twin Towers (“Man On Wire” and “The Walk“). A TV show could make one of its lead characters someone who profited from 9/11, and still expect you to find him sympathetic to some degree (“Billions”).
There’s one movie you’d have to include in any discussion of 9/11 cinema. Although the attacks are an inciting incident rather than the focus of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” (depicted seemingly in a nod to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s segment of the 2002 quick-response portmanteau art film “11’09”11 September 11” as 911 calls are heard from the towers over a black screen), the film makes a pretty good argument for being the defining work of post-9/11 American cinema.
Depending on who you ask, that might be a double-edged sword. To some, “Zero Dark Thirty” is a perfectly fitting movie for the Bush years, a jingoistic apologia for shady American foreign policy and torture. To me, it’s the perfectly fitting movie for the Bush years, a portrait of how a nation lost its soul in pursuit of obsessive revenge (and a great double-bill partner to Steven Spielberg’s earlier but similarly-themed “Munich”). Either way, the debates as such will surely continue for years to come, because the quality of Bigelow’s filmmaking and of star Jessica Chastain’s performance is inarguable.
Presently, it feels like filmmakers might have moved on in some ways from 9/11 as subject matter. Superhero movies occasionally nod to it to attempt to achieve gravitas (most recently, the rubble clouds of “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice”), while prestige filmmakers have seemingly other issues on their minds —the economic crisis of the late ’00s, Black Lives Matter, or the Boston Marathon bombings. But just as the ramifications of that day will go on for most of this century and beyond in ways few have yet anticipated, I’m sure that filmmakers will have much, much more to say in time.
