The 9/11 Commission Report (2006)

hyped garbage

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The 9/11 Commission Report (2006) * (out of 4) The Asylum, the studio best known for really bad and really cheap "mockbusters" decided to deliver something straight in this docudrama based on the commission report that was released on the September 11, 2001 attacks. Leigh Scott wrote and directed this picture and I think the majority of the blame has to go to the screenplay. I'm really not sure what type of story they were trying to get across but it's an incredible mess that never makes too much sense. Trying to get all of the pre-9/11 stuff into a low-budget, 84-minute movie was probably a bad idea to begin with but it certainly doesn't help that the execution is so poor. The story is pretty much impossible to follow but even worse is the really bad dialogue. As bad as the dialogue is, it doesn't help that the performances range from bland to bad. I mean, the story is bad, the dialogue is bad and the performances are bad so with all of this considered it's really easy to see why the film tanked. Whenever you're trying to deliver a political thriller, having all of those elements not work is just leading to a disaster. I can't say how many times we were supposed to be caught up in this tense political thriller yet the dialogue they were saying seemed to have been written by a ten-year-old and the performances saying it appeared to be from a high school play. There's just no way around the fact that this film really shouldn't have been made or at least not in the fashion that it was. The "Jason Bourne" style of filmmaking with the camera just sliding around everywhere also doesn't work here. I'm sure it was meant to draw us into the action but it fails. In the end, this film is just bad all around and if you're going to watch something bad from The Asylum then it's best to get something that's also campy.

We'll never know The Truth about 9/11. And this shoddy movie proves it.I recently watched a YouTube report claiming there were no planes involved in the Twin Towers' destruction; that all the news programs were supposedly provided with same-angle shots of the Towers from a mysterious source (probably the gubmint?), and in that provided footage CGI planes were substituted for real-life MISSILES which actually hit the towers....It's a compelling video, and though I am not a Wacko Conspiracy Theorist per se, I am still not sure myself whether actual planes hit anything that day (the Towers, the Shanksville field, the Pentagon) - because there is no plane wreckage available. (And what about those infamous "black boxes"? None recovered.) A million other theories abound, all of them courting a droplet of Truth awash in an ocean of speculation. But you'll drown in malarkey before you find anything truthful or worth speculating about in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT, a no-budget movie that is trying to close the barn door after all the horses and jihadists have escaped.Writer-director Leigh Scott is obviously a concerned American citizen who wanted to enlighten audiences on what the 560-page report might reveal. It would help if his movie had actors, instead of a guy who looks like David Duchovny, a chick who looks like Gina Gershon, a guy who thinks he's Russell Crowe and another guy who I'm pretty sure is trying hard to be Sean Bean. It would help if his camera operator didn't have Parkinson's; if the lighting director wasn't trying to save on electricity; it would help if his editor didn't have Attention Deficit Disorder, or if the soundtrack wasn't some tuneless new world order esoterica; and the looping should have probably been inserted when people were actually moving their mouths.We can't even call this propaganda. It's too funny. And by funny, I mean unwatchable.You can't squeeze an issue this complex into a two-hour film, but Leigh Scott tries anyway, including all those sexy catch-phrases we've grown inured to: bin Laden's intent to attack, purchasing weapons from Somalia, non-aggression agreement with Iraq, Mussawi attending flight school, weapons of mass destruction...The problem is: we know it's all retrospect, so every discussion the concerned intelligence operatives have with each other reeks of fake hindsight all crammed into a neat conversation. Like contrived reverse engineering, everything pertinent is mentioned succinctly so that we can shake our heads in wonder at how incompetently all these branches of government screwed up.There's a ludicrous interrogation scene with a lubricious bimbo beating up on a guy with tomato sauce on his face. Now - that would be considered torture if most guys didn't consider it a turn-on.The tagline is: "What if the attack could have been stopped?" By this movie's account - and, we presume, according to the Commission Report - the CIA and other underground agencies were all set to capture bin Laden and didn't. Everyone involved with the "terrorism" reports (you mean you actually read these reports?) is so concerned we just want to slap them for their bad acting.Yet the whole story goes so much deeper than the banal soundbytes the negligent Ku Bush Klan foisted on the American people after 9/11. We now know that even capturing bin Laden before the 9/11 attack would not have changed or achieved anything - the wheels were in motion with or without that Taliban figurehead whose involvement was the possible figment of someone's fevered imagination to unite America against a common enemy. Contrary to popular belief "they" didn't "attack us." As Ron Paul tried to elucidate, it was a case of Middle Eastern blowback - "they" were so sick of America planting their infidel feet "over there" that they brought the war "over here." So though George W. Death likes to tout the nonsensical, "We're fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here," in reality "Because we're Over There, the fight has been brought Over Here." The 9/11 attack was not so much about the intricate planning of terrorists, as it was the gross negligence of the Bush administration, who we know (without the probing of Commissions) had all the intel from the Clinton administration onwards; information about terrorist cells reaching critical mass and their intent to cause chaos. But the Oil Idiot of Texas, who refused to read his Daily Briefings and would rather vacation at his Crawford ranch than spend one extra day at work, abrogated the duty he swore an oath to perform - protect the American public.And then the scum who called himself president used the attacks brought about by his negligence as a political hammer against his own dumbed-down countryfolk to score a second term, shred the American Constitution and take America into a Fake War on the basis of a lie (WMD), with a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Strangely enough, the movie never treads near the Ku Bush Klan, offering no opinion or judgment, Leigh Scott wanting to remain neutral. Tell that to the raped and pillaged hundreds of thousands in the Fake War on Terror in Iraq.Out of pure coincidence, I realized I was watching this DVD while wearing my "Bush lied. Thousands Died." t-shirt.

Despite what the other commentors have said, I felt that this was a very well done independent film. It was also quite informative and found a dramatic way to capture the ultimately dull and boring 9/11 Commission Report. I wasn't bothered by the camera work at all, and thought it was an interesting choice to be a "fly on the wall" rather than use more subjective framing and lighting. I also had no problems with the audio in my 5.1 surround system, although I did notice a couple of places where things seemed a tad out of sync. The acting in this film was exceptional, especially the character of "Mike" played by Rhett Giles. It was a very magnetic and moving performance. I also liked the actors in the Minnesota sequences, as they all felt very real and natural in their dialogue. Perhaps some viewers are bothered by what is clearly a more neutral or almost conservative viewpoint on world events. I found it to be a breath of fresh air, as everything coming out of Hollywood, studio or independent, seems to be obsessed with liberalism and liberal ideology.As a side note, I watched another film by the same company with a lot of the same actors. It was really strange to see actors in such a serious work, then in a complete piece of fluff!

This documentary was very amateurish. It could have been made by college students. Assuming that it was, my grading is as follows. Content : C, Sound Quality : F ,Cinematography : F ,Acting : D, Soundtrack : F, Casting : C, Boobshot : A ......Overall Grade :DI found myself getting seasick as we walked down the streets with the characters,bobbing up and down with each move of the cameraman'step.My mother-in-law even changed the batteries in her miracle ear and she could not hear the muffled dialog. Extensive post production editing and CGI would not help this bomb. These students would "barely" pass my course.My advise...don't waste your time or money for the one "A".