From United 93 to Worth: how Hollywood grappled with 9/11

In the two decades since the terror attack on New York City, films and TV shows have tried to revisit or reflect on a culturally traumatic event

A common refrain in the days after 11 September 2001 was that the scenes of unthinkable destruction looked like a movie. In some ways, it did: the World Trade Center had been destroyed on-screen in three late-90s blockbusters: Independence Day, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Overnight, movies with bombastic scenes of mass violence all but disappeared; for years afterwards, the attacks themselves, whose imagery saturated the national consciousness, proved too traumatic, too untouchable, to be reimagined for film or TV.

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