Tower sets out to document one of the very first mass shootings in American history, when an unhinged gunman opened fire from the University of Texas clock tower in August 1st, 1966, ultimately killing 16 people and wounding many others. Maitland sets out to do a few things that are very interesting and distinguish the movie from any other “true crime” documentary I’ve ever seen. Maitland recreates the events of that day using a heavily rotoscoped aesthetic so that he can place his re-enactors on an animated backdrop of the University of Texas campus; this instantly gives the movie a kind of uncanny feeling that works to its benefit. The events feel slightly unreal, in the way they felt to people on that day, people who had never experienced anything like this before. The other innovation here is Maitland’s decision to focus on the victims and the survivors, leaving the shooter an almost entirely unseen presence. The clock tower is the stand in for our killer, looming over the campus and the victims. But those victims are the focus of the film; the shooter’s name isn’t even mentioned until the last few minutes of the movie. I found this really refreshing, given the way that the “true crime” genre often ends up backhandedly glorifying the killers and the monsters in the stories by building them up into these almost mythological avatars of evil. We spend a lot of time, typically, exploring the psyches of the killers; in Tower, we spend a lot of time with the normal everyday people who were on the campus that day – some of them died, some of them were horribly injured, some of them acted heroically, some of them acted foolishly. I’m not sure but that this isn’t really the most moral way to explore these kinds of violent acts – leave the killers to be forgotten, but pause to mourn the fallen, comfort the survivors and honor the heroic.
And I did ultimately find the film very emotionally moving. As I mentioned above, the rotoscoped aesthetic initially seemed a little distancing to me, but the impact is cumulative apparently because I ended up having a really profound emotional experience in those last ten to fifteen minutes. It’s kind of devastating actually. Ultimately, I think Maitland has crafted a real piece of art here that genuinely connects with the viewer in a powerful, thought-provoking way. Just the formal choices would be enough to make the film of interest; the emotional impact makes it essential. And at only 82 minutes long, it takes less time to watch than the entire real event took to happen, 96 minutes from the time the first shot was fired to the moment when the shooter was himself shot dead. It’s a really compelling, fascinating, thoughtful and moving film that I highly recommend. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a rotoscoped aesthetic and a focus on the victims instead of the killer distinguish this true crime documentary; the cumulative emotional impact is powerful. 4 stars.