John Bacich Don't listen to the previous reviews. They're probably from Clinton supporters who still defend him for not taking Bin Ladin out when he had the chance. The movie is excellent. It spares neither officials on the right or left who dropped the ball on 9/11. And believe it, there were plenty on both sides who did so. Compare this movie to The Siege, a 1998 Denzel movie that predicted America would put Islamists in concentration camps when America got fed up with terrorist attacks. Talk about getting it wrong is an understatement. Hollywood should get the Shame award for that one.

Robin Cook I rented this movie the other day on DVD and knew nothing about it other than what was on the jacket. I read other users comments and felt compelled to comment as well. Despite the low budget casting and filming processes, I felt that the message conveyed in this film was very good. The message? Well, one that came across to me was that no matter what status a person has in society, people are just human.Considering the finger pointing for blame on the terrorist attacks (past and present), this movie conveyed that we are all human with frailties. How would a mother and father respond to their potential son-in-law's father being imprisoned and considering how smoothly he had logical answers directed toward him when interrogated. We can all be easily fooled and terrorists are experts with intensive training to play upon human traits, whether we are an American or not.One thing, though, that I wished this movie would have attempted to clarify more was regarding Homeland Security set up and its' boundaries for the homeland. Is America going to have another agency with such power it can abuse and terrorize Americans similarly to the IRS? I agree, having an agency that combines databases of other agencies sounds cool, but the message I derived from this movie is that this set up for another agency was vastly opportunistic. Hence, I personally felt terror from this movie in this regard and how this agency will be run and what boundaries/limitations have been set, if any. After all, even I had trouble with Tom Skerritt's role of even being considered to set up such an operation ... just not the type or very credible ... just a nice old meandering neighborly guy, eh? Sure, like this is the kind of man now in charge? Perhaps keep him on the Lifetime movie channel. But, gee, maybe using him in this role helped to use this movie as a tool to influence people to be supportive enough to pay more taxes to support this new undefined (unrestricted?) powerful agency? Am I the only one who was left with feeling more terror about this new agency after viewing this film? Regarding other non-ending pieces and parts, I felt that this was intentional to provoke thought processing for viewers. If there had been more film with the tracking down of the terrorists and other things, it would have taken away from the human quality of this film.With that said, I felt this movie was very good in conveying that people are human and if it helped to teach some people not to let their emotions take charge in serious decision-making , then it succeeded in that degree.

vchimpanzee At first, I was expecting this movie to be about what happened on that terrible day. Although I have seen numerous documentaries, this was my first fictional TV-movie based on the events of 9-11. When it started several years in advance, I figured the movie would end with the day that changed America, and that we would see many of the events that led to what happened. A pilot did not seem to want to learn enough about flying, and this raised a red flag with his instructor. But then the time line advanced too quickly, and it was clear things were going to have to slow down a lot. They didn't, and the dark day came quickly. We saw a number of events in various parts of the country which related somehow to 9-11, but it took a while to figure out how they connected with each other. If one scene was true, there were people who knew how to stop the events from happening, but they didn't try hard enough. A connection was made to either September 11 or November 9, several weeks in advance.In Seattle, a female FBI agent played a role in stopping a group of people who might have been terrorists. She just happened to be the girlfriend of a man who spent most of the movie fighting in Afghanistan. I suppose the Afghanistan scenes had value, but that should probably have been a whole other movie.Admiral McKee, who had a major role in developing the Homeland Security department after the attacks, happened to have a daughter who was going to college at Berkeley, who knew a professor who was one of the many suspicious-acting people from the Middle East or nearby. Some of these people were perfectly innocent but ended up getting arrested or worse when we were unable to trust people who were 'different'.One character had a ticket on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. I won't say whether the character made it onto the plane, but an effective scene with this character's family showed their reaction when the plane went down. One interesting scene showed a plane with problems that led the military to believe terrorists were on that plane. The unthinkable almost happened. This was quite interesting.After 9-11, we watched as various government agencies showed they were not prepared and made attempts to change that. We saw something taking place in Afghanistan, though exactly what wasn't clear. We saw the innocent and the possibly guilty being detained. We saw this tragedy from many different angles, maybe too many for this short a movie.And--this could be a SPOILER--No happy ending to this one.

goleafs84 "Homeland Security" wasn't the worst, but by the same token, wasn't all that great. I guess I expected a little better out of this, since the cast was pretty decent; Tom Skeritt (Picket Fences), Beth Broderick (Sabrina The Teenage Witch), Scott Glenn (Silverado and Backdraft) and Stephi Lineburg was good as Melissa McKee, Admiral McKee's (Skeritt) daughter.What I liked about it was the timeline from events leading to September 11th, 9/11 itself and the formation of the US Department of Homeland Security. I especially liked that they didn't dwell on 9/11, although it was a tragic event and what lead to the formation of the US Department Homeland Security, we all know what happened, lived through it and I didn't want to see a another long drawn out version of it. That would've been the easy thing to do.The problem I had with this show, is I'm trying to figure out what it's supposed to be. Is this a movie, a mini-series or a pilot to a new drama/action series? By the end of the show, there were many "loose ends" that needed to be tied, especially the final scene, but it looks like it won't be. I'm assuming that this was supposed to be a pilot to new series, NBC bought it, but changed their minds and scrapped it. * 1/2 out of 5 for being incomplete