The Anthrax Attacks (2022)

INTERESTING SUBJECT DESTROYED BY DRAMATIZATION

The documentary titled The Anthrax Attacks, a feature-length film by documentary filmmaker Dan Kraus, explores what happened and what repercussions the film-maker Krauss has explored. Most Americans will remember it because it was big news: Just one week after the September 11th terror attacks, letters were sent to Democratic offices in Washington, D.C., and media offices in New York City that contained deadly anthrax spores.

A new Netflix documentary chronicles the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S., as well as one of the largest and most complicated FBI investigations in the history of law enforcement. Through this documentary, Netflix and BBC bring us 20 years into the history of the anthrax attacks and the investigation process into them, which was then closed down in 2010. This documentary contains numerous video clips of 2001, as well as scripted re-enactments, and has been an excellent way of understanding the attacks more.

As the movie mixes archival footage and dramatizations with interviews with relevant FBI agents, along with others affected by the case, it is curious how little it pays attention to just how beneficial the anthrax attacks were for the administration, which was already planning to exploit 9/11 and fears about Islamic extremism to building support for an invasion of Iraq. Those letters, as well as an extensive FBI investigation attempting to locate and prosecute their authors, are the focus of the new Netflix movie, which brings to light this history more than 20 years after anthrax sent the nation into a frenzy. More to the point, their latest documentary is telling the story from the moment.

The fact that this doesn’t exist after twenty years after the attacks is certainly unprecedented. The mixing of archives footage and the dramatization acts throws the audience completely off course as it changes the tone between each shift. As much as this should have been distinctly an archive footage documentary, the dramatic moment doesn’t help it. There’s no other indication of the narrative to push the story in the right direction. According to the new Netflix documentary, the man was originally cleared of suspicion years earlier, when he, along with all his colleagues, submitted a sample of anthrax for analysis, which did not match anthrax strains used in the 9/11 attacks. Portrayed by Marvel alumnus Clark Gregg in a new Netflix documentary, a man was initially not a major suspect in the subsequent FBI investigation. The whole film goes into severe detail on certain aspects of the terror attack and how it links up with the attacks during nine-eleven.  The editing doesn’t always flow correctly. It’s choppy and shifts between scenes in an irregular manner.  The first minutes before the intro begins, it has tension thereafter it’s a dramatization mixed with documentary-styled. It’s obvious here that Dan Kraus didn’t know how to tackle this story.