Thoroughly normal emotional porn.

Rating: 3/10 (27 November 2006)

Nothing special - well-wrought piece of emotional pornography. Sure to get the inner patriot going (if you have one) and certainly effective in making us emphasize with the victims. But for all the effective sound effects and insistent focusing on faces and flashbacks of family life, the movie is ultimately empty. There is no great story, no truly interesting characters and no great theme other than a Hallmark comment on how America "stood together". The film wants nothing more than to show us how bad it was for these people and probably succeeds in making many Americans revisit the confusion and emotions of the first days after the attack. A great chance to say something about the actual attacks or the reaction has been wasted, the film says nothing and thematises nothing, it just shows the horror. All in all, it feels like a TV movie writ large.