Critics reviews

The rotoscoping is just one of the effective tactics Maitland uses to give vividness and urgency to his film, even as it retains a firm basis in the facts and perspectives provided by the archival footage and the eyewitness accounts adapted for his script... The use of animation adds a more abstract aspect to the most visceral and upsetting moments here.

The film does not invent its images; it uses animation to fill in the blanks the news footage couldn't. More radically, and urgently, it uses animation to make us imagine the bodies of the survivors, whose testimonies are recounted by actors, back on campus. They narrate their fear, grief, and confusion in seemingly real time, living it on-screen before our eyes.

It's a strangely intoxicating deconstruction of the non-fiction form. It openly admits that documentary is unable to capture the whole truth even when stating "facts." For every story Maitland follows, there are countless others that are inevitably experiencing the same event in different ways.

Maitland uses familiar and even overfamiliar devices—mainly animation and, in particular, rotoscoping—to compensate for a dearth of archival images. But he does so in boldly imaginative ways that prove to have a long philosophical tail, one that ultimately circles around to address the very subject of the nonexistent images that the animations replace, and to spotlight the role of the movie itself in revealing that historical lack of imagery and making up for it.

Once in awhile, you see a documentary that creates its own distinctive aesthetic while still honoring the subject. "Tower" is that kind of movie... Maitland and his collaborators structure the story in the manner of a nonfiction novel—or the type of ensemble drama that Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson or Austin's own Richard Linklater might make.

Words can't do justice to the singular power of Keith Maitland's documentary Tower... Through the recollections of witnesses and victims, the film simultaneously builds a present-tense narrative while also portraying the terrifying resilience of memory and trauma.

The results in "Tower" are extremely liquid, with each line incessantly ebbing and flowing, creating a vivid sense of life.

Broadly, though, Tower's treatment is both taut and humane, devoting longer passages to moments frozen in time for the survivors... The film barely names the Austin shooter, and is careful not to get into subsequent debates about his mental and physical health, but the immediacy of Maitland's taut historical reconstruction is dampened by a lack of argumentative thrust in the film's homestretch.

The mesmerizing rotoscopic animation—punctuated by nerve-wracking rifle shots and, subsequently, the color red overflowing the screen—effectively suggests the eerie atmosphere of first bewilderment and then horror that came to engulf surviving victims, witnesses, concerned armed and unarmed citizens, and others present. Tower succeeds mightily as dramatic re-enactment, oral history, and journalistic enquiry.

Tower," a formally and thematically ambitious documentary that revisits the 1966 sniper shootings at the U. of Texas at Austin, powerfully channels the terror and confusion of that terrible August day while also achieving the weight and authority that can only come with time and distance. It's a gripping dramatic reconstruction, a tribute to the heroes and the fallen, and inevitably an expression of nostalgia for the days when a mass shooting still had the power to shock.

The unfocused finale stymies an otherwise richly engaging portrait. However, the imagery of the survivors 50 years on provides a fascinating contrast with the present. As one of them notes, no psychologists swarmed in to help them cope with their trauma in the shooting's aftermath. As a result, the terror continues to live with them, and "Tower" masterfully recreates it.