Maybe that’s just because I’m an idiot I’ll take that hit. I did not even realize, until very far into this 30-minute sequence, that his whole purpose is to provide a counterpoint to what Gage and his group are saying, as his monotone was going in one ear and out the other. The problem-and one can hardly fault Lee here-is this: Comparatively, Sunder is an absolute bore. There’s no mention, meanwhile, that journalists have been debunking 9/11 conspiracies since at least 2005.įor “both sides” bona fides, Lee instead turns to Shyam Sunder, who led a study for National Institute of Standards and Technology that tore down the conspiracy claims that Gage and his pals bandy about-even the so-called smoking gun of WTC 7. Johnny Fever look you’d expect from a conspiracy theory guy.) When Gage shares that his devotion to his cause cost him his marriage, and Lee compares Gage to Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (then cuts to that film’s most emotionally charged scene), you’re primed to feel bad for him. (Only demolitions expert Tom Sullivan has the Dr. Other members of Gage’s group appear, and are similarly eloquent. It all zooms by rather quickly, but the images are striking. In the original version of the film, we see footage of buildings on fire that don’t come down, then controlled implosions that, on the surface, certainly look similar to what happened at the World Trade Center. Still, as the Slate article notes, Gage is “responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks ” the story argues that much of his rhetoric is just one small step away from typical 4chan-level anti-Semitism.
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He’s a sharp, serious man in a suit, and he knows how to behave on camera.
The primary voice demanding “9/11 Truth” in the original cut is Richard Gage, and in Lee’s film, he does not look like a nut. As first noted in an interview in the The New York Times, then in a pointed column in Slate, the initial cut of Epicenters didn’t merely touch upon conspiracy mongers and so-called 9/11 truthers-it exalted them.
The fourth episode is now being reedited in advance of its airing on September 11 it has been pulled from HBO’s press screeners app, and Lee sent a note via publicists to journalists that read, in part, “I Respectfully Ask You To Hold Your Judgement Until You See The FINAL CUT.” While I personally hold Lee and his work in extremely high esteem (I gave Chi-Raq five stars!), this incident feels notable enough to me to disregard his request.Īt around the 75-minute mark of the episode’s original cut, the film’s panopticon approach to the city’s twin crises of COVID and terrorism went down an unusual rabbit hole. I don’t know how long the finished version will be. Seven-and-a-half of those hours were, I felt, an exuberant, maximalist, mad rush of a love letter to New York from one of the city’s greatest artists. Spike Lee’s documentary NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½ was, when I watched it via preview links sent to me by HBO, eight hours long in total.
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