How Does 9/11 Cinema Hold Up 25 Years Later? A Sobering Return

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I turned thirteen-years-old a week before the events of September 11th, 2001. In hindsight, it was kind of perfect. A massive change in our society coming at the time I was undergoing the transition into teenager-dom. I remember the day acutely. I'd fallen asleep in my mom's room the night before, and woke up the next morning to my mom bolt upright in bed watching the news. She tried to explain to me what was happening and, for the most part, I was fairly confused. Growing up in California, I had to go to school that day and, for the most part, it was business as usual.

9/11 has always been filtered for me through popular culture. The closest person I knew who had died that day was Angel Juarbe, the kind-hearted firefighter who'd won the bizarre reality TV show Murder in Small Town X (a series I'm convinced I'm the only one who watched religiously), which aired its finale a week before the events. I spent a lot of time reading Ain't It Cool News and other entertainment message boards about the movies that were canceled due to their questionable portrayals of firefighters and cops, as well as the infamous Spider-Man trailer.

Hollywood waited a respectable five years before making movies aimed at presenting what happened on that day. United 93, released in April of 2006, was directed by Paul Greengrass and detailed the events that were alleged to have taken place on the plane that crash-landed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And World Trade Center, debuting in August, was Oliver Stone's attempt to lay out the story of two Port Authority police officers trapped in the WTC after it collapsed.

9/11 cinema has fascinated me for 25 years. I argue that it's pretty much an entire decade of cinema, ending around the time of Barack Obama's inauguration, wherein every movie, in some way, is a response or result of the shifting perceptions of our attempts to process that single day. And yet I hadn't actually revisited World Trade Center and United 93, the first and most explicit recreations of those events, since they debuted in 2006. In watching both back-to-back, I was fascinated by the choices made in each film, how I responded to them at the time vs. today, and by how a quarter of a century of other history made me look at these movies overall.

Just one year before World Trade Center and United 93 arrived in theaters, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone released Team America: World Police, an '80s action spoof with an all-marionette cast that was, at the time, a pretty searing indictment on our current wartime regime (the war in Iraq had started just two years prior). But, for the most part, movies made in the years after 9/11 focused on American resilience, patriotism, or at least weren't poking at politics heavily. This was a time where even implied connections to the events of 9/11 were taboo (never forget that the original title of the 2002 creature feature Eight Legged Freaks was Arac Attack).

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