Jarek Kupsc's The Reflecting Pool

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Directed by Jarek KupscOpens July 11, Two Boots

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More About

• Jarek Kupsc
• Joseph Culp
• World Trade Center
• War and Conflict
• Terrorism

Jarek Kupsc's investigative conspiracy drama wants to be this generation's All the President's Men, but instead of focusing on real characters and events, it's based upon a hypothesis that unsoundly links every discrepancy and omission from the official 9/11 report back to the U.S. government. (It's the "controlled demolition" theory, with knee-jerk comparisons to the Reichstag fire.) Kupsc plays a Russian-American journo who is given one last shot to incite controversy before his paper's corporate takeover, leading him on a truth quest with a 9/11 victim's grieving father (co-producer Joseph Culp). Strictly acting as mouthpieces for Kupsc's suppositions, the advocate-and-skeptic team is less Woodward and Bernstein than Mulder and Scully, with 7 World Trade Center standing in as the secret-filled Area 51. (The 9/11 Files: I Want to Believe?) Kupsc's strongest point—that government-sanctioned truths should be fully probed by apolitical committees—is unnecessarily pummeled into us: "It boggles my mind that nobody cares about this stuff," his character says, one of many passive-aggressive taunts disguised as dialogue. Between Culp's melodramatic digressions in mourning, a toss to another 9/11 theorist as the film's only crackpot, and Kupsc's utter lack of visual and storytelling flair, fictionalization proves a feeble approach to convincing the masses.