9/11 Inside the Pentagon

Gr 7 Up—Released on the 15th anniversary of September 11—and serving perhaps as a needful reminder that the terrorist attacks extended beyond the World Trade Center—this documentary focuses on the fiery destruction of part of the Pentagon and the ensuing rescue efforts. The filmmakers plainly didn't have much to work with, as the blurry videos of billowing smoke and fleeing figures are well padded with reconstructed glimpses of wreckage shot through red filters, and multiple cutaways to the Twin Towers in New York. Additionally, most of the preserved phone and radio communications are of such low quality that the added subtitles are a necessity, and the arranged tearful reunion at the end between two of the handful of survivors and rescue workers is at best a labored effort to crank up the emotions. With some help from skimpy graphics, viewers may come away with a general sense of the catastrophe's course and aftermath but not of its scale or of any of the nearly 200 people who died.