Any negative review or rating below 8/10 of this work (a DOCUMENTARY series) is based purely on ignorance and stupidity. The End.
STATEMENT OF TRUTH: Basing a review of CLEARLY DOCUMENTED FACTS and the ACTUAL EXPERIENCED REALITY of others on opinion and conjecture is thoroughly & absolutely RIDICULOUS. You, meaning all the OTHERS who were NOT PRESENT for originally filmed/documented experiences and/or included as survivor subjects in the filming of these experiences, DO NOT get to have an opinion about someone else's LIVED EXPERIENCE!!! It's THAT simple.
A review or rating of documentary work should be solely inspired by one's visceral response to the filmmaker's artistic expression of said facts & experiences. For example, the question to ask one's self is: how did the inclusion or exclusion of XYZ make you feel?/what kind of response did XYZ elicit from you?
For me personally, I truly appreciated the very candid interviews conducted throughout the series so far. They added another important, necessary dimension or layer of humanity to the potentially abstract or otherwise oh so very blunt force trauma and horror of catastrophic events collectively experienced, even if in very different ways, by Americans across the country and around the world. My experience of the terrorist attacks perpetrated on September 11, 2001 was INCREDIBLY traumatizing (I ended up hospitalized as a direct result of that stress & experience) in its own way despite living in middle America, very much removed from the Eastern Seaboard. I have/had family in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, etc. For whom I was very concerned and afraid. However, my trauma, though absolutely no less valid, is quite significantly different than someone else's who may have been at the Pentagon, inside the Twin Towers, was a family member of someone aboard United 93 who LITERALLY lived through that deadly attack, or had a direct personal attachment to any of those locations. Those interviews, the ones conducted by Spike Lee himself, were an excellent addition to this work. I learned things about which I'd previously NO EARTHLY CLUE because of those interviews. The same can be said of the musical selections, the Covid stories & experiences, the BLM movement & protests, in support of social & cultural change, etc.
This creatively produced, extremely well done docuseries is nothing short of amazing. Spike Lee is simply brilliant and I applaud him, his crew, and everyone involved with the series development and production.
