Great series somewhat let down by the pretty pointless sexual encounters / relationship material that adds literally nothing to the story and, worse still, breaks the pace of the story and becomes a distraction for the addition of nothing but padding. The Inquiry scenes were OK showing the lengths that senior intelligence officials will go to to cover their asses once it hits the fan! Just goes to show what the intelligence services can fail to achieve when they really put their minds to it.
Complex, intelligent, and sobering; superb television
Based on The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), Lawrence Wright's exhaustively researched and critically acclaimed winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (2007), whilst the book is about how al-Qaeda succeeded (with a lot of time spent delineating just why they hated American culture so much), the TV show is about how the US failed. It's a story of arrogance, incompetence, ignorance, and tragic inevitability. And although the binary of CIA=bad/FBI=good is more than a little reductionist, and whilst there's a real dearth of information on al-Qaeda itself, this is a deeply sobering series, which is at its infuriating best when it shows us, as it does time and again, just how easily these globe-altering events could have been prevented.
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/NXgFX
The whole thing is fantastic, but so chilling to watch. You know what will happen, yet you find yourselves screaming at the screen for them to get it together.
I'm mostly sceptical when it comes to US shows dealing with stuff like 911. You never now what you get when you begin, as some of them have a tendency to resolve the government of any fault. Not this one, though.
While they don't claim the story they present here as facts (only based upon but dramatized as said in the disclaimer) I think they are pointing the finger in the right direction. I could've done without all the personal stuff but I guess it is necessary to make the charaters appear more relatable for the viewer. After all, this isn't a documentary.
Top notch on the production side, cast is great, you see and feel a lot of work went into this show.
8.6 on average rounds up to 9
Shout by abetancortBlockedParent2019-03-20T20:55:08Z— updated 2020-01-20T22:28:05Z
What a shitty job the CIA did! The only thing they were able to do right was covering up their asses... They probably didn’t want to ruin their almost perfect “record” of failures.