Watch Tower For Free

People are voting emotionally.

Admirable film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I'm a grad student at UT Austin. I went on the Tower Tour last week - on the very observation deck from where the sniper shot. The tour guides aren't supposed to make the tour about the shooting story, so they didn't go into it, but they told us about the documentary.It's a mix of archival footage and animation. The animation recreates the shooting. And it was riveting. It's probably riveting for anyone to watch, but watching a horror story unfold in so familiar a location - one that's part of my daily life - is something else altogether.Maybe I'll take a different route tomorrow, or maybe I'll figure out a way to put this story out of my mind. Also, it was August 1st just yesterday. 52 years to the date.FYI there is heavy security at the tower these days. You have to pass through a metal detector and everything to go on the tour.

This gripping and brilliant film recreates the horrific mass shooting on the campus of the University of Texas, in Austin, on August 1, 1966. On that date, Charles J. Whitman, after killing his wife and mother, rose to the observation level of the Tower building with an arsenal of weapons, and began to fire on innocent people below for about 90 minutes. killing 16 and wounding 33 others.The movie combines archival footage, eyewitness accounts, and animation in a most effective way to bring the viewer a moment by moment accounting of the tragic event. As many wounded and dead lay in the courtyard below the Tower, the police found that they did not have the weaponry that would reach the sniper. Thus, it would be up to 3 Austin policemen, led by a Captain Martinez, and a civilian to try to climb to the observation deck and put an end to the nightmare.Overall, the movie, directed by Keith Maitland, is greatly enhanced by presenting to the viewer the moving accounts of those that survived the mass shooting and how today the trauma of that day has affected their lives. Can highly recommend this film to those that like this type of movie.

This film is really an extraordinary achievement, in both the animation genre and the documentary genre. This could have been just like many other documentaries where talking heads are intercut with archival footage. By using animation, the film is able to create re- enactments that play around with memory and affective experience in a way that wouldn't be able to be done without animation. It's able to be a clear documentary while still telling a cohesive, linear narrative with many main characters and different perspectives at its core. This deserves to be seen and widely acclaimed, its achievement in not just how much of an emotional impact it has but also in various aspects of filmmaking are enough to recommend this to fans of quality cinema.

Keith Maitland's "Tower" is the fascinating and powerful new documentary about the mass shooting which occurred on the University of Texas campus in the city of Austin on August 1, 1966. While such shootings today are commonplace, the University of Texas shooting was perhaps the first mass murder to be covered by the media in real time. Although the story of the "Tower shootings" has been told before on a number of occasions on television, Maitland's take is completely different and original. In addition to utilizing the extensive film footage that was taken at a distance as the events unfolded on that tragic day, Maitland employs rotoscopic animation to illustrate the experience of survivors of the massacre as well law enforcement responders, in an up-close, personal way. Maitland employs actors to play the parts of the participants and paints over their images with his software, which enables him to capture a reasonable reenactment of what went on that day. Interviews of victims and responders in the present day are interspersed with their fictional counterparts, which gives us a more emotional, complete picture of what happened as opposed to a simple, "dry" documentary.The main protagonist here is Claire Wilson, an 18 year old student, who, along with her boyfriend, were the first to be shot by the diabolical shooter, Charles Whitman, who ended up killing 16 people and wounding approximately 30 others, from his perch on top of the University of Texas tower. Wilson's boyfriend was killed instantly and she also lost her unborn child, as she was five months pregnant at the time.The story hardly ends there. For an agonizing hour and half, Wilson was lying on the pavement in 100 degree weather, bleeding from a bullet to her abdomen. Remarkably, another student braved the sniper and joined Wilson in order to comfort her—all the while playing dead as Whitman had her in his sights. Finally, additional heroes--a group of students-- ran out in front of the tower entrance, and dragged Wilson to safety.The shooting is told from the perspective of a number of key eyewitnesses including a TV reporter who drives around in his news car, reporting the events as they transpire. We also follow two police officers and a civilian as they bravely climb up the tower, and eventually take out the gunman, who Maitland wisely hardly mentions.During a recent Q&A with a lead producer, I learned that the University of Texas did not want to talk about the massacre after it happened. In fact, it was only last year that a true and lasting memorial was erected there to commemorate the terrible event. Tower becomes a welcome opportunity for the survivors to express emotions that have been in some cases, bottled up inside them for years.Tower is successful due to its effective use of documentary film footage and modern-day interviews, coupled with the rotoscopic animation which gives it a dream-like quality. Tower is a gripping tale which will leave you speechless after you leave the movie theater.