Review: TOWER, Strikingly Told and Sadly Relevant

On a hot summer day in 1966, multiple shots rang out and a body fell down. Within moments, a teenager was dead and his pregnant girlfriend lay bleeding by his side.

That was only the beginning of a horrifying 90 minutes or so. No one within eyesight of a shooter in the University of Texas Tower in Austin was safe, though initially no one knew the source of the terror. All they knew was that bodies were falling and people were dying.

Keith Maitland's documentary Tower takes an approach that sounds wildly inappropriate, recreating the events of the day through rotoscopic animation and archival footage. Very quickly, however, any preconceived reservations are dismissed by the immediacy of the drama.

Interviews with survivors are voiced by actors in the animated segments, resulting in a push/pull of emotions; the animation creates a small amount of breathing space that allows for needed perspective, while the dramatized voices pull the viewer into the emotions of the bewildered, shocked people who were on the scene.

Maitland focuses on the witnesses, from the shooter's first, pregnant teenage victim to a variety of bystanders -- some heroic, some paralyzed by fear -- to a radio journalist who provided dangerous live reporting to police officers navigating an active crime scene filled with dozens of victims. The cumulative effect is startling.

At the time, this was all new, unfamiliar territory. The decade was already turbulent, but the idea of a random mass shooting was shocking. The 25-year-old shooter had barricaded himself on the observation deck at the top of the 30-story tower; hours earlier, he had murdered his mother and then stabbed his wife to death in her sleep. On his way to the top of the tower, he shot and killed three more people before unleashing his weapons upon more helpless, unsuspecting victims.

In 1975, Kurt Russell starred as shooter Charles Whitman in The Deadly Tower, which told the story largely through his troubled eyes. The movie for television was broadcast in October of that year, which is when I saw it, and it lodged in my mind. Last year I read A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders by Gary M. Lavergne, first published in 1997, which is an absorbing account that provides needed context on Whitman and some of his victims.

Tragically, mass shootings have become frequent in recent years, and the accumulation of sorrow may have dulled the senses a touch. Strikingly told and sadly relevant, Tower is a sobering reminder that death can come at any moment, from the least likely source.

The film opens in select theaters in Austin, Dallas and Houston, Texas on Friday, October 28 via Kino Lorber.