Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

How sad is this?

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I know it is not possible to always achieve perfect cinematography. However, using Johannesburg and its rural areas would probably be worthwhile to your Intelligence community. Most of your fears are residing there. Where did you get so many goats? And the poor dog. One of millions suffering and dying in ZA. Other than that, good show, it is expected that the inner dealing in the US is as corrupt or unbecoming as it is in ZA.

The Looming Towers is a decent drama depicting events which led up to 9/11. We think we know. We guess. But this seems to fill in some blanks pretty well. I know the whole show isn't 100% accurate and the story is part fiction, but the gist is there and it's told really well. The gist is that the FBI and the CIA were in a p****ng contest over power and neither would share information with each other. Had they shared info, maybe 9/11 could have been avoided. The story gets a little drug out with the personal side of the two main characters. It kind of distracts the focus of the story. Nobody really cares that one guy had extramarital affairs or that the other has a girlfriend. It leant nothing to the story -- and even kind of cheapens it. Those parts could've been left out to tighten the show a bit.Overall -- It delivers a good story, was well acted and is worth seeing. Kudos to HULU for original, interesting content.

The last episode, which begins when the first plane hits (not a spoiler), brought me up against my own memories of 9/11. My son was in the city, and on that day I worried about him and listened to him on the phone. Aside from that, I was numb. It seemed utterly incomprehensible that this should have happened. Who? Why? How? Equally incomprehensible was the speed with which these questions were in fact answered, for reasons the Hulu series makes clear: the answers were already at the fingertips of various players who didn't know what to do with them (though the finale implies that various parties were prepared to exploit the bombing instantly). The series begins at the (or a) beginning, including the Kenyan embassy bombing, the USS Cole bombing, and interactions among the players on both sides. The questions have been answered, the lines drawn in such a way as to meet at this point, with the bombings. As I watched the last episode, I was able to feel for the people I love who were breathing that dust that day. I could finally weep for them, as well as for John O'Neill and Ali Soufan, whom I had not known about until now.

I found the series overall to be done well and answered many questions I've had since 9/11, however there are so many characters it is difficult to remember who everyone is. I had to keep stopping and going to cast list (if I recognized the actor) to see who he was and looked up several of the people whose lives they were playing. That made it difficult to see the underlying idea of the competition between the FBI and CIA being the cause of the failure of both because I couldn't remember who was FBI and who was CIA and who was White House, etc. Instead of wasting time with characters' personal lives, I wish they had spent more time making sure we knew who was who.