Six Movies Show How Hollywood Has Grappled With 9/11

The 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 has brought with it a fresh round of major-milestone documentary programming. This includes a three-part National Geographic series focused on reunions between survivors and rescuers as well as a two-hour MLB Network effort exploring how baseball helped restore a sense of normalcy to the nation after the attacks. (Its title: When America Took the Field.)

Television drama began to address what came to be known as 9/11 while Ground Zero was still smoking. Aaron Sorkin wrote and filmed an episode of The West Wing just weeks later. It grappled with America’s response to terrorism, Islamophobia and nascent civil liberty incursions. Shows about the NYPD, FDNY, FBI and CIA — including Law & Order, Sleeper Cell, Rescue Me, 24, Homeland and The Looming Tower — engaged with what had happened that day as well as the long aftermath.

Meanwhile, studio film projects were pulled and postponed. Exhibits A and B: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Warner Bros. action thriller Collateral Damage had featured a terrorist skyscraper bombing and Tim Allen’s Disney comedy Big Trouble involved a smuggled bomb on an airplane. In time, though, national exhibitors saw the release of a group of movies which have helped to shape the country’s understanding of one of the hinge moments in American history.

While 9/11 broadly influenced the work of many filmmakers’ subsequent projects — Steven Spielberg, on the release of his 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, spoke of how “I haven’t been able to get out of my head” the “searing image” of people fleeing Manhattan across the George Washington Bridge — the half-dozen movies below are among the most direct interpretations to date.

25th Hour (2002)

Spike Lee adapted David Benioff’s debut novel (yes, the Game of Thrones co-creator), about a convicted drug dealer’s final day before turning himself in for a prison term, to capture the sense of grief and paths not taken in New York City after 9/11.

United 93 (2006)

Paul Greengrass’ real-time dramatization of the hijacking of the plane which — due to the heroic revolt of passengers who’d learned of the other attacks, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — instead of its intended target: the U.S. Capitol building.

World Trade Center (2006)

The politically provocative director Oliver Stone — JFK, Nixon, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July — opted for a narrow focus on a pair of Port Authority workers trapped under the rubble, along with their desperate family members, in this human drama.

Reign Over Me (2007)

Adam Sandler stars in this character study about a man whose wife and children were aboard one of the Sept. 11 planes. Years later, he’s turned inward, radically withdrawn from the world around him.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

Stephen Daldry’s interpretation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel follows a child’s exploration of the city and his own imagination as he processes his grief after the death of his father (played by Tom Hanks) in the World Trade Center attacks.

Worth (2020)

Sara Colangelo’s biopic of lawyer Kenneth Feinberg (portrayed by Michael Keaton), who ran the September 11^th Victim Compensation Fund. It’s a paperwork procedural examining how an administrative system attempts to make a moral decision.