The Movie: 9|11 is a documentary made by French brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet that was originally supposed to be a documentary that followed a rookie New York fire fighter through his initial nine month probationary period, hopefully to capture, as they said, a boy becoming a man. What they ended up capturing was, as one of the other fire fighters put it, him becoming a man in about nine hours.

9|11 is an extremely powerful documentary, and contains the only footage of the first plane hitting, and also what is believed to be the only footage from inside the World Trade Center shot after the planes had hit the building. It follows the men of the New York Fire Department inside tower 1 attempting to evacuate the buildings and make sense of it all.

While it was extremely tastefully shot and edited, I'm pretty sure that not everyone is ready to watch this documentary, particularly those who are extremely sensitive, and those who have suffered great personal losses from the events of September 11. There are things the filmmakers purposefully chose not to shoot, and not to show, as seeing these things would serve little purpose except to satisfy those who take pleasure in having seen these horrific acts executed.

The footage captured by these two men is just plain incredible, placing you right in the middle of the action, directly in the path of danger. I have a deep respect for the courage exhibited by the Naudet brothers, and an even deeper respect for the men whose lives they were documenting. The interviews conducted with various fire fighters and the verbal accounts they give are equally moving. I've already used this word, but this is just a powerful, powerful documentary that stirs up emotions I didn't know I had.

This is the same documentary that was broadcast on CBS.

The DVD: 9|11 was originally shot on digital video, and is presented in a letterboxed, non-anamorphic widescreen format. Given the weight of the subject matter being covered, I feel strange even commenting on these technical details, or even writing any review on this at all, but I'll continue anyway. The image quality on this DVD suffered greatly from compression artifacts, especially heavy gradient stepping.

The audio is satisfactory, and exhibits only the sort of limitations you would expect from an on-camera mic used in this kind of run and gun documentary style. As far as special features go, there are four additional interview segments not included in the main feature.

Other than "play" and "interviews" there are no other menu options for you to select from... but this is a DVD that really does not need any fancy features -- the documentary easily speaks for itself.