Series Review: 'Looming Tower' is a dramatic chronicling of 9/11

Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction tome, this 10-part political drama traces US failure in the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks

01 April 2018 - 00:00 By tymon smith

After winning the streaming sweepstakes last year with its Emmy-nabbing dystopian Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid's Tale, Hulu is once again bringing out the big guns for its new 10-part political drama series The Looming Tower.
Moving from projections of the future to an analysis of America's all- too-recent past, the show is adapted from Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 nonfiction tome about the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the infighting between intelligence agencies in the '90s that contributed to the failure of the US to prevent them, allowing for the rise of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
The show is produced by Wright, documentary director Alex Gibney and Capote and Foxcatcher writer Dan Futterman, who have opted for dramatisation rather than a multi-part documentary.
This decision pays off handsomely thanks to stellar performances from Jeff Daniels and Peter Sarsgaard, who represent the differing counterterrorism policies of the FBI and CIA respectively.
BOOZING, WOMANISING HERO
Daniels plays John O'Neill, the boozing, womanising, foul-mouthed head of New York's FBI Counterterrorism Unit "I-49". He's a morally conflicted Catholic in his private life who in spite of his many flaws is presented as the hero of the story.
O'Neill was the man who rightly believed that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on US soil but was hampered in his attempts to do anything about it by intelligence-sharing failures and bureaucratic squabbling between his agency and the CIA.
WATCH | The trailer for The Looming Tower..

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