‘11 Minutes’ Is the Most Terrifying—and Frus
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GUN CONTROL
The four-part Paramount+ docuseries uses found footage to put viewers smack in the middle of the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas.
Nick Schager
Entertainment Critic
Published Sep. 26, 2022 4:46AM ET
In terms of unadulterated experiential terror, 11 Minutes has few non-fiction equals, utilizing an array of cellphone and bodycam videos to place viewers directly in the midst of the mass shooting at Las Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest country music festival on Oct. 1, 2017. Fifty-eight people died that evening and another 869 were injured, all due to the lethal actions of a lone gunman firing from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Boasting commentary from Jason Aldean, who was on stage as the event headliner when the madness erupted, director Jeff Zimbalist’s four-part docuseries (Sept. 27, Paramount+) immerses itself in the moment-to-moment chaos of that calamity with stunning urgency.
It’s a long-form portrait of hell that, figuratively speaking, never ends, both in its victims’ minds and in America, where massacres like this are now somehow accepted as par for the course.
11 Minutes’ value lies in its immediacy, which underscores the nightmarishness begat by our unwillingness to put systems in place to keep military-grade weapons out of civilians’ hands.
Still, director Zimbalist’s decision to focus on you-are-there anarchy—and, by extension, to let his material do the talking—also comes across as a bit of an evasion. In the face of such calamitous monstrousness, the docuseries’ disinterest in more vocally confronting the source of this avertible suffering does a disservice to those who lost their lives that day, and to all the others who, as its in memoriam coda makes clear, died in the numerous similar tragedies that have followed in its wake.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/11-minutes-is-t...r?ref=wrap