Twenty years after September 11, 2001, the United States is still searching for answers. It is twenty years, but then it will be forty, sixty, one hundred and it will not matter: the social wound generated by the terrorist attacks of September 11 and its political consequences, with a war that has lasted twenty years, may be indelible. 11/9: Inside the President’s War Room, which premieres on September 1 on Apple TV +, recalls the events of that day again.
He does it when the last soldier The American left Afghanistan, the country most affected by the decisions made twenty years ago. 11/9: Inside the President’s War Room explores the events of that day in detail but without delving too deeply into the consequences. The latter, perhaps, is explained because if that had been the objective, a documentary series would have been necessary.
11/9: Inside the President’s War Room, narrated by Jeff Daniels, doesn’t seem to be looking for too many answers but rather remember what happened on September 11, 2001. It does so by incorporating the different personalities involved. They, time through, offer their vision in this regard, providing some nuances.
Does it work as a documentary?
The voices, the narrative resources and the research reflected in data, images and some other issues, invite us to think that 11/9: Inside the President’s War Room It is a full-blown documentary film. However, the lack of counterweights within Apple TV + production in relation to speeches, usually official, makes its essence is diluted within the genre.
That allows us to intuit one of the searches of director Adam Wishart: to bring back those facts. From there, make a kind of detailed follow-up of the actions of George W. Bush, President of the United States at that time, and thus reveal how a crisis of such dimensions was handled within the political circle closest to the presidential figure .
In that sense, 11/9: Inside the President’s War Room it does work because it offers an almost intimate look at September 11, 2001. The testimonies, so long later, serve to weigh part of the images that are shared with the viewer. The tension of the moment, beyond the subsequent interpretations and consequences, is summarized in one circumstance: during that day, the safest place for the president was to be inside the plane presidential at any number of meters high.
‘11/9: Inside the President’s War Room‘and the weight of the symbols
11/9: Inside the President’s War Room count the hours that elapse during September 11, 2001, two of the main icons of the United States were attacked. The financier, represented through the Twin Towers of New York, and the military, made walls through the Pentagon, in Washington. The country that seemed untouchable was exposed to the world.
Almost three thousand people were killed by the terrorist acts. Since then, a search for explanations and culprits would begin, going from Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who was assassinated ten years after the attack, in 2011, to the various conflicts that the incursion of Americans into Afghanistan involved. In the midst of so many events, the globalization of an overwhelming event. At the beginning of the century, the world was still taking steps towards globalization, with technological advances and the internet as some of the main resources. Therefore, September 11, 2001 not only resonated in one country but also it disrupted the way of understanding security and politics on a global scale.
Although this text does not pretend to give explanations in this regard, the feeling remains that 11/9: Inside the President’s War Room skip the possible readings about it. The sober tone works. It is true that the title places a kind of fence in relation to the production and September 11, 2001. As someone who says to the viewer: this is what we can offer. It does not cheat in that sense. But its premiere context, twenty years later and with the conflict in Afghanistan still open in different senses, seems to demand from this documentary available on Apple TV + something more than just a gesture of memory.