- Network: HULU
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 28, 2018
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Critic Reviews
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From the remarkable cast (Michael Stuhlbarg and Bill Camp deserve analysis all to themselves, so enthralling are their beautifully developed supporting characters) to deft direction (Gibney, an Oscar-winning documentarian, brings his past expertise to scripted TV in clever, efficient fashion — the flash-forward testimonials and found footage both speak to his storytelling brilliance), this is a limited series worth seeking out. It may be an unmissable history lesson, but it’s also just one helluva story, told very, very well.
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It's scary, a little sickening, and entirely spellbinding.
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Tower feels like a real-life Homeland, with romantic subplots uneasily shoehorned into a narrative that shifts between tense missions abroad and heated debates behind close doors. ... Looming over it all is our own terrible knowledge of where this will end on 9/11. [19 Feb - 4 Mar 2018, p.14]
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Many streaming series have bloated lengths and extraneous subplots, but almost every scene in Tower feels vital, even if it's occasionally guilty of being a bit too on the nose. ... In its softer-touch moments, the series excels at creating a sense of existential dread, offering answers to questions we wish we didn't have to ask, and finding something new to say about a story we all already know.
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The Looming Tower is a taut, tense restaging of the internecine squabbles between the FBI and the CIA in the lead-up to 9/11.
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Every time The Looming Tower threatens to spin off into melodrama completely, the cast (and talented directors) find a way to ground it. Ultimately, The Looming Tower is a dissection of incompetence, and how lack of communication and teamwork led to an international tragedy. It’s just complicated enough to feel historically accurate but not to push out viewers. In that sense, it balances historical commentary with what we still need from television most of all, whether it’s on cable or Hulu: entertainment.
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The Looming Tower, despite its high stakes and its ostensibly true story (though many details have been changed), is a cop show. A really well-done cop show, admittedly, but a cop show. And more power to it.
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It's true, this original miniseries, premiering Wednesday, demands a certain patience and commitment from its audience as it unpacks the impossibly complex geopolitical and domestic components that led to the rise of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the fall of the Twin Towers. But the payoff is a show that blooms into an all-consuming drama by Episode 2.
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It’s fascinating to watch the ways these men--and most of the principals were men--gathered information, formed theories and conclusions, and butted heads with one another over plans of action. It’s dismaying to absorb one of this miniseries’ most timely subtexts: that during the most intense time leading up to the 9/11 attack, the American media was distracted by President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.
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The show doesn’t need to strain to make points about the sort of person who refuses to intuit what’s on the horizon–not that that stops Schmidt from indulging in melodrama. “I don’t get paid, sir, to be a citizen of the world!” he shouts, testifying about lives lost half a world away in U.S. bomb strikes.
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The result is an accessible, illuminating series that does not downplay the petty and tragic elements of the tale.
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The Looming Tower is compelling television, even as it marches toward its tragic end.
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Instead of being heavily self-important, The Looming Tower is swift and urgent, with an outstanding cast and zingy writing.
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It’s a testament to The Looming Tower that the story is as gripping as it is, given that we know where it’s all going. Co-created by Dan Futterman and Alex Gibney, it plays a bit like “Homeland” before “Homeland” got played out.
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Looming Tower, for which author Wright is a co-executive producer, is visceral and fully engaging in its best moments, but also head-hurting with some of its efforts to diagram the myriad goings-on abroad. By the end of Episode 3, however, the story has gotten a firmer grip.
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The three episodes made available to critics are masterful and smart in how they use our knowledge of what happened on 9/11 to supply retroactive suspense to the events of the late 1990s. That may be more challenging to maintain over the remaining seven episodes, but even if the the construct falls short, the series still has a core of complex, morally various characters, brilliantly embodied by Daniels and others, to hold our attention.
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Showrunner Dan Futterman (writer of “Gracepoint” and “Foxcatcher,” once a co-star on “Judging Amy”) keeps the tension high and the pace generally relentless. “The Looming Tower” only falters in an embarrassingly trite early scene of O’Neill with one of his many women. But when the focus is on the work, “Looming Tower” looms large as a well-made story of human and systemic failings.
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The result is a crisp, quickly paced and essentially ordinary crime procedural, with a surprising amount of fictionalization for dramatic effect and narrative convenience. ... The Looming Tower does benefit from good performances, including those of Mr. Rahim, Peter Sarsgaard as a querulous C.I.A. agent (seemingly based on the real-life Michael Scheuer) and Bill Camp as an F.B.I. gumshoe (a composite of New York-based agents).
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The show’s disclaimer about fudging some facts to smooth the story out makes it difficult to decide if you should Google along with it (or thumb through Wright’s book) trying to nail down its accuracy. Maybe it’s more watchable if you let yourself get lost in it and pay closer attention to its themes rather than its footnotes.
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The Looming Tower demands a hasty combination of faith in the storytellers and half-forgotten knowledge of the history. Absent that, the series is essentially like a well-shot, brilliantly cast, fast-moving season of Homeland, which is better than the actual current season of Homeland.
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Any time Tower ventures into the personal lives of the men tracking Al Queda, it feels out of place. ... There is plenty to admire in Tower, though--most notably a captivating performance by Rahim.
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Whenever it glimpses into the private lives of men like O’Neill, The Looming Tower accentuates these individuals’ character flaws, but it leaves us only with a sense of conflicted anticipation, waiting for O’Neill and his cohorts to return to work so that we can witness their critical failures.
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The Looming Tower is a frustratingly not-quite-there account of the run-up to the 9/11 attacks. ... The end product plays a bit like Law & Order: Bin Laden Unit. Once you settle into that specific groove, The Looming Tower is an engaging enough series, with a few “wow” moments.
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Indeed, it is, at times, quite thrilling. It's also, at times, tedious. It is a mixed bag of impressive strengths and frustrating shortcomings, which, of course, is precisely what Wright is telling us about the intelligence community before 9/11.
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The performers offer flashes of persona in quiet moments, gesticulations, and a handful of exchanges but for the most part, the characters come off as little more than figures meant to convey information from Wright’s book.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 57 out of 104
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Mixed: 7 out of 104
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Negative: 40 out of 104
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Feb 28, 2018A TV at its finest. Everything on the highest level. Congrats to cast&crew for this masterpiece.
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Feb 28, 2018No words do describe how good this mini-series is. Just can't wait for more episodes. A must watch for sure now!
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Feb 28, 2018Best tv series of the year for sure. Amazing story, dreamy cast and awesome directed. Can't wait to watch more and more. Thanks, Hulu!