Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie

aka: Post Nine Eleven Terrorism Movie

9/11 did a lot towards making the mere mention of terrorists in fiction an incredibly risky gambit in the eyes of Hollywood. Many executives even went so far as to remove the World Trade Center from their movies to avoid offending or saddening people in the years afterwards, for fear of it being too soon.

For Films and Live-Action TV series, the time after September Eleventh can be classified into three periods:

The First: Where a great, great many movies after 9/11 don't talk about it, mention it, or even allude to what happened. Stories set in the United States, especially New York City, after the attacks that should logically deal with terrorism never even talk about it passingly.

In The Second, as these fears subsided, writers and directors would dare to be brave and artsy by using incrementally larger references and even plots related to terrorism.

Until eventually, The Third brought the opposite reaction to the first: movies that go overboard in dealing exclusively with terrorism.

These movies (though Live-Action TV deals with this too) tend to fall flat for several reasons. In the First, because of the total absence of what should be logically there (lame excuses add to this). The second tend to be too self-congratulatory for the relatively minor mention; leading into the third turning Anvilicious in their focus on terrorism.

Another aspect is that the armed forces tend to be given one of three treatments: puppy-kicking monsters, a helpless Red Shirt Army, or a heroic Badass Army. This last usually happens in action movies that want to kick terrorist tail. This (for international viewers anyway) tends to have a bit too much America Saves the Day, considering the war is ongoing.

Interestingly, shows that dealt with terrorism before 9/11 tend to fare better than those made after, albeit they reacted in different ways.

As more and more time passes, these works are inevitably becoming Unintentional Period Pieces.

A Sub-Trope of The War on Terror. See Western Terrorists.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Eden of the East, Mononobe's plans involve what's basically a copycat crime version of 9/11. He noticed how those attacks brought people together in America, and so wants to recreate that effect via a False Flag Operation which involves firing missiles at Japan and killing thousands of people. Oddly, the hero doesn't find the False Flag Operation part an intrinsically bad idea — he just wants to create the same effect but without having to kill anyone.
• Full Metal Panic!, despite being set in an alternate history where the USSR never fell and terrorism is of the good old-fashioned state-sponsored kind, got the Type One treatment, with its US premiere postponed for about a year following 9/11 just because its fourth episode features a plane being hijacked, despite the fact that the plane then lands safely and all its teenage passengers are rescued by Mithril — so except the actual act of hijacking an airplane, there's zero parallel with 9/11. More awkward is that a critical part of Sousuke's backstory is being a Child Soldier in the Mujahideen, the broad anti-Communist insurgency movement during the Soviet-Afghan war that al-Qaeda branched off from. Not wanting to suggest that the series' hero was once fighting on the same side as Osama bin Laden,^note though this wouldn't be true, as Osama was booted out by the time Sousuke would have gotten involved, and the specific commander Sousuke fought under is an Expy of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a political enemy of Osama's whom al-Qaeda would eventually assassinate the 2002 anime adaptation opts to change Sousuke's stated home country from Afghanistan to the fictional "Helmajistan", refrain from naming the guerilla force he was part of, and remove any references to the fact that he was raised Muslim.
• Terror in Resonance is absolutely drawing on this trope. The first episode starts off with the theft of plutonium from a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. It ends with a twin-towered building exploding and one of its towers collapsing, complete with massive smoke/debris clouds engulfing hapless people. The next episode starts off with still images of rescue workers in the rubble that appear to be directly inspired by photographs of the aftermath of 9/11, followed by high-level anti-terrorism conferences as police discuss their options.

Comic Books

• The Boys is set in an Alternate Universe where superpowered individuals have existed since WW2, but are mostly Vought Corporation-sponsored hedonists. While 9/11 did happen, the President (not Bush, who'd managed to decapitate himself with a chainsaw) had listened to the warnings and ordered the planes to be shot down, but the Vought-planted VP knocked him out so the supers could save the day. The supers royally screwed up the rescue attempt, with the net result being that the planes plowed into the Brooklyn Bridge rather than the WTC. Some of the more controversial aspects of The War on Terror still occur (the main characters work for the CIA), but most of the plots involve preventing Vought from mass-marketing supers.
• The Punisher MAX:
  • The very first arc has a corrupt CIA agent try to hire Frank to do the Agency's dirty work. Frank's objections are along the lines that they get their funding from heroin (plus, y'know, he's already had experience with doing CIA wetwork in Vietnam).
  • "Mother Russia": Several American generals have been secretly funding their own terrorist cell to carry out deniable attacks on other countries. They end up using it on Russia (the plane gets shot down) to cause a distraction from Frank stealing a bioweapon.
  • "Up Is Down And Black Is White": An ambitious Mafia goon thinks up a plan to deal with Frank once and for all: piss him off into Unstoppable Rage so he'll make mistakes and be easier to kill (and does this by sending the video of him defiling the Castle family graves to every news station). When Frank responds by hitting every criminal organization he knows of, City Hall holds an emergency meeting to discuss what to do with the mayor specifically saying he does not want to see the word "terrorism" associated with the case.
  • "Man of Stone": Frank is lured to Afghanistan to confront the general from the previous arc (who'd seen through the "terrorists" plot and was Reassigned to Antarctica for it). While he does kill islamists, it's only to avenge O'Brien's gangrape at their hands (her CIA ex-husband had thrown her to them when he'd ripped off the Taliban on a heroin deal).
  • Nick Fury regularly appears to make parallels with the US' other lost war, since both he and Frank are a product of it.

Films — Animation

• The Return of Hanuman has Hanuman preventing 9/11 by bending the Twin Towers. He also captures a person similar to Osama bin Laden along with other terrorists and a George W. Bush-like person.

Films — Live-Action

• First, there are the movies actually about the 9/11 attacks:
  • 9/11 depicts the story of a small group trapped in an elevator during the attacks on the World Trade Center.
  • United 93 ironically somewhat subverts the trope by being a Verité-style docudrama.
  • World Trade Center tells the true story of two Port Authority police officers who were trapped under the rubble for 24 hours.

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• 25th Hour was at the time (2002) amazingly risqué for showing five minutes' worth of a character's firsthand view of ground zero being cleaned up. To be fair, considering the rest of the movie's downer tone, it's used devastatingly well.
• The protagonist of American Assassin, Mitch Rapp, has a personal vendetta against terrorists after his girlfriend is killed in a terrorist attack.
• Casino Royale (2006): M says that the CIA discovered a massive shorting of airline stocks that allowed "somebody" to profit from 9/11. While it's never stated outright that Le Chiffre was involved in 9/11, it's at least heavily implied: he tries to pull the same scam in the movie, and as a banker for terrorists it stands to reason that he'd have the connections to know 9/11 was coming. M's offhand comment "Christ, I miss the Cold War", besides being a Mythology Gag to older James Bond movies, is likely an allusion to the post-9/11 state of politics.
• Cloverfield is a Post-9/11 Kaiju Movie. The monster's rampage through New York is explicitly designed to call to mind the 9/11 attacks and the state of emergency that New York was under at the time, starting with a collapsing skyscraper (and not just any skyscraper, but the Woolworth Building, a Lower Manhattan landmark) producing a dust cloud that rolls through the streets in a manner not unlike the famous shots of the dust from the collapsing World Trade Center rolling through Lower Manhattan. This video by Up From the Depths goes into more detail.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy: With the titular Dark Knight representing order and justice and practically every major villain of the trilogy representing sectarian fanaticism, large scale terrorism, or chaos, it's practically impossible not to find parallels to The War on Terror.
• The Foreigner (2017) is an odd example. The antagonists are a terrorist cell, but instead of Islamic terrorists, it reaches way back into the archives and pulls out the IRA.
• Much of the plot of Iron Man takes place in Afghanistan, but the Ten Rings aren't Islamist terrorists. On the other hand, the fact that the Ten Rings aren't jihadists isn't made apparent to the viewer until later in the film, when the video of Tony being held captive is given in-universe subtitles, which seems to be deliberate.
• In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Jack Ryan joins the Marines not long after the 9/11 attacks. The movie is also about trying to prevent a terrorist attack on New York.
• The Kingdom gives the dispatched US agents the military might of an entire platoon to kill an entire terrorist cell in their fortified barrio. Interestingly, it does otherwise deal with the issue more realistically than other films, dealing with the politics and culture involved and even how both sides can get fanatical, including a rather chilling future Tyke Bomb in the making.
  • The original draft of the script had a different ending in which all of the U.S. agents were killed by the other Saudi liaison as the Americans boarded the plane at the end. It was agreed that the audience just wouldn't be able to walk away from the movie after seeing that, and rightfully so.
  • The one-of-a-kind multimedia montage is one of the most concise and accurate film representations of the events that led up to 9/11, it should be used in history classes.
  • Strangely yet unsurprisingly, the real-life Saudis claimed that the movie was racist and depicted them stereotypically, in spite of some of the more positive imagery that the movie gives their perspective.
• Mercury Man is more than a bit shameless in this aspect. the Big Bad is an Afghan terrorist named Osama bin Ali (though he sounds and looks Thai), and his evil plan is to blow up American military installments in Thailand with stolen weapons.
• Munich, which deals with the aftermath of the 1972 terrorist attacks during the Olympics, takes place long before 9-11 and hence avoids mentioning it specifically... though the last shot of the film is of the Twin Towers in New York City. Judge for yourself.
• Olympus Has Fallen is more of a type three than the other "White House gets taken over by terrorists" film White House Down below, as it has a darker and more brutal tone to it, and the villains are all North Koreans. The sequel London Has Fallen is a type three as well, dealing with both Middle Eastern Terrorists and Western Terrorists.
• Red Eye is Wes Craven's take on the genre, done as a Psychological Thriller with horror elements. The terrorists' identity and ideology are never outlined (they're heard speaking Russian, but that's about it), the plot instead concerning one of them trying to force the manager of a hotel to collaborate with their plot to assassinate the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security while he's staying at her hotel.
• Reign Over Me, the main characters of which are a 9/11 widower and a friend attempting to help him recuperate, exemplifies the second type, while not actually being about terrorism per se.
• The very last shot of Remember Me shows a classroom with the date of September 11, 2001, then the main character Tyler in his office in the World Trade Center. Audiences and critics alike did not take this well.
• Right at Your Door, which is about a biological attack on Los Angeles, ignores the actual terrorists completely, focusing solely on the effect this would have on average people.
• The Sicario films, while dealing primarily with the United States' War on Drugs, sit firmly in this category. In the first film, the CIA agents respond to the Cartels' operations in Arizona as if they were stamping out an insurgency in the Middle East. More specifically, the events of the sequel, Day of the Soldado, are directly triggered by jihadists crossing the Mexican-American border to carry out bombings.
• The Siege, released three years before 9/11, is about the FBI dealing with homegrown Islamic terrorists committing bombings throughout New York, starting with an MTA bus, then a Broadway theatre, a school, and the FBI New York office.
• Team America: World Police, being made by the South Park guys, is an over-the-top parody of these types of movies. The eponymous Team America goes after terrorists, but often cause more damage than the enemies they fight, and it's all played for laughs.
• The Transformers Film Series managed to capture all three periods:
  • The first film averted all mention of the war on terror. Even the army base in Qatar attacked in the beginning, though in the Middle East, has been there for decades. Notably, the US military is capable of helping the Autobots on occasion, and even fighting off Scorponok. However, no one ever mentions the possibility of a terrorist attack, even with the hacking attacks it's assumed to be the work of Iran, North Korea, or China. This may actually be a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, since the ability to take out a US military base with almost no survivors left is something that no terrorist group is even close to doing. Even the hacking as portrayed in the movie is beyond the abilities of any terrorist groups. US military networks are very hard to breach even less so with someone doing it from inside Air Force One.
  • In the second film they portrayed American-led special forces hunting Decepticons around the world with carte blanche international support.
  • By the third film, this had changed completely. The Decepticons are portrayed as terrorists that execute a 9/11-style event on a citywide scale in Chicago. The filmmakers evoke 9/11 imagery throughout the entire scene by setting buildings on fire, knocking them over and showing human beings jumping from them. What happens if Americans make concessions to terrorists makes up a large portion of the plot.
• Unthinkable focuses on the psychological toll that extreme interrogation techniques have on its practitioners, and whether or not it being a part of their job makes them "good" guys or not.
• Played straight and subverted in War of the Worlds (2005). Rachel Ferrier asks "Is it the terrorists?" when the aliens start attacking. The film's first act and part of the second act are full of imagery that evokes the attacks as well: aliens fire heat rays that turn people into clouds of ash, and in one scene the aftermath of a plane crash is studied. Also notable is the attitude of the protagonist's son, who is obsessed with "getting back at them". By the end of the second act, imagery reminiscent of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars takes center stage, making it clear that the film isn't just using the aliens to represent terror groups.
• White House Down is more of a mix of two and three, but the background of the real Big Bad is slightly more complicated. The movie itself has many comedy bits.
• You Don't Mess with the Zohan deals directly with the terrorism involved in the Israeli-Arab conflict mostly in the third way: the main character is a counter-terror operative. In a rather surprising fact for an Adam Sandler film, both sides are treated as sympathetic people who want to just get on with their lives but have to fight a ridiculous war to please annoying, nationalist parents. This isn't entirely true, but it's damn good for a film that otherwise focuses on Sandler finding new ways to talk about sex with a funny accent.
• Zero Dark Thirty depicts the CIA's manhunt for the architect of the September 11th attacks, Osama bin Laden. The film averts the third category by showing that the search for bin Laden was anything but easy; the central protagonist never kills anyone herself and the agency is powerless to stop many attacks in the intervening years, even ones directed at their own.

Live-Action TV

• Law Procedural shows had episodes that followed the second example. The 2001-2002 seasons of The Practice, Judging Amy and Family Law all had episodes where an Arab or Persian character is picked up by the FBI or Homeland Security, and the lawyers are stymied by "classified information" in trying to understand what their client did and how to defend them. These showed fears of civil liberties eroding in the "early days" of the War on Terror. Law & Order dove deep into the second type during the Fred Thompson years, occasionally veering into Type 3. Episodes often touched on 9/11's effect on the country and New York City in particular, and often used the War on Terror to generate Jurisdiction Friction (with the feds interfering with — or outright hijacking — cases in order to further anti-terrorist goals).

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• 24 is poster child for the hysteria of the post-9/11 era.
• Becker: The penultimate episode has John help an old lady get to Manhattan. When they arrive, she begins telling a story about her son, with Becker quickly catching on even before the references to September and the view from his office spell it out.
• Blue Bloods:
  • The NYPD uniforms have a party salad of decorations on a plate that also includes their badge, and the most prominent decoration is the one awarded to 9/11 first responders, a simple black bar with the letters "WTC".
  • Frank was a 9/11 first responder and saw the towers go down; he suffers from survivor's guilt as a result. He also has a peeve about people exploiting the tragedy to further their careers. His oldest son Danny was a Marine who fought in Fallujah.
  • In one early season 1 episode, the NYPD is put on high alert for a bomb threat by homegrown Islamic terrorists.
  • In "Hall of Mirrors", an undercover cop who infiltrated a terrorist cell is shot in a drive-by. It turns out to have not been related at all to the cell infiltration but to a love triangle.
  • In "Moonlighting", Frank broods over a quote from Donald Rumsfeld regarding the Iraq War ("the known unknowns").
  • "The Job" is about one of Frank's colleagues dying from 9/11-related illness.
  • In season 6, a police officer named Thomas Scully is up for promotion to Sergeant. However, Frank has reservations about the promotion because Scully was one of four officers tried and acquitted 14 years earlier for the death of an unarmed Muslim teen who was shot sixty-one times in a dark apartment. Such a promotion could be bad as far as public relations are concerned, given the current climate. Frank talks with Jamie, who says that Scully was one of his instructors at the Academy. When he brought up the shooting, he said that at the time, his precinct was on edge, given it was just after 9/11, there was a tip that someone of Arab ethnicity was stockpiling weaponry, and a cop in their precinct had been shot in a housing project just days before the incident. This caused a perfect storm of circumstances that caused them to gun down this teen who reached for his wallet.^note The entire incident is based on the Amadou Diallo shooting incident of 1999.
  • In "Friends in Need", Frank acknowledges the issues that come up with intelligence gathering while hosting a number of top British police officials, bringing up the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks in doing so.
• Blue Heelers mentions this trope in passing, from fear of Muslims being terrorists in light of 9/11 to Osama bin Laden being used to score political points in a town election to an episode revolving around Afghanis on the run: subverted when it has to do with them being asylum seekers.
• Largely averted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (she missed the attacks), but "Help" has counselor Buffy... help a boy who feared his brother joining the Marines. Afghanistan was a battlefield and Iraq was about to become one, and Buffy reassures him that it's not stupid to be scared of what might happen like he thinks it is.
• Daredevil (2015): Multiple:
  • The show is set in Hell's Kitchen, which in season 1 is slowly rebuilding from "The Incident", which anyone who's seen The Avengers (2012) knows was when aliens came out of a wormhole in the sky and wreaked havoc on Manhattan. Wilson Fisk is also exploiting the destruction by bid rigging on construction contracts.
  • After Fisk's bombing of Hell's Kitchen to eliminate the Russians, which he paints in the press to look like the work of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, Foggy likens the guy to Al-Qaeda (something Matt, being the eponymous masked man, takes offense to).
    Foggy Nelson: Please tell me I don't detect a hint of admiration for that terrorist.
    Karen Page: This is just all speculation. Nobody knows if he's a terrorist or what.
    Foggy Nelson: You're absolutely right. Terrorists have causes. They claim responsibility. Al-Qaeda wanted the world to know exactly what kind of assholes they were. This guy? Not a peep. All terror without the "-ist." You know what they call that? Nut job.
• Designated Survivor is essentially 9/11 but with Capitol Building being bombed,^note and some speculation goes that United Airlines Flight 93 was meant to hit the Capitol had it not been for the passengers' revolt forcing a woefully unprepared incumbent to take the reins. The high tensions and emotions lead to Muslims being targeted because it was the Taliban and Al Qaeda last time and the threat of Islamic State, with the likes of Bin Laden and the immediate reaction name dropped. It even has a reenactment of the President (ironically Kiefer Sutherland of Jack Bauer fame as a liberal against war-hungry conservatives) being pressured to commit to swift brutal retaliation, even possibly a nuclear strike.
• Farscape: When John Crichton finally gets back to Earth, he asks why his previously open-minded and egalitarian father has such a paranoid and hardline attitude on sharing alien technology with other nations. His father replies simply "September the 11th." Crichton, having seen a lot worse, isn't impressed with this view.
• Homeland can absolutely be renamed American Foreign Policy in a Post 9/11 World: The Series, from Carrie's obsession being because she did not stop the New York and Washington attacks to drone strikes in Al Qaeda and ISIS to 4chan social media cyber-war against foreign and domestic terror.
• JAG (predecessor to NCIS, below) went right into full The War on Terror mode after 9/11 (naturally, seeing as the show was always just one big propaganda project to drum up support for the military). The main characters routinely traveled into hotspots like Afghanistan, Iraq and others where real-life Judge Advocate General personnel would never set foot.
• Jessica Jones (2015) establishes that some people have developed prejudices against powered people in light of the Incident, and they are meant to be analogous to the sort of treatment people of Middle Eastern descent got after 9/11. At one point, a woman who lost her mother in the Incident even tries to kill Jessica just because she's enhanced, while in the season 3 finale, after going rogue and killing three criminals, Trish gets thrown in the Raft (basically Superpower Gitmo) just because she's enhanced.
• NCIS is essentially a Lighter and Softer version of 24, above.
• Person of Interest is very much a product of the post-9/11 world. Reese and Carter are both veterans of The War on Terror. Finch started working on the Machine the day after 9/11, with the primary purpose of identifying future potential threats to the country.
• The Punisher (2017): Frank Castle and Billy Russo both served in a Marine Corps black ops unit in Afghanistan that was secretly smuggling heroin back to the United States inside the corpses of KIAs. The second episode of season 1 sees Dinah Madani having a conversation with her partner while walking around the reflecting pools at the 9/11 Memorial, even namedropping the attacks and peoples' resilience to bounce back after such major losses.
• Rescue Me is interesting in that while 9/11 is incredibly important to the series, it hardly ever touches on the idea of terrorism. Rather, it focuses on 9/11's effects on firefighters and their families (in particular, turning a large number of them into alcoholic Shell Shocked Veterans). In later seasons, they purposefully split the fanbase by having star character Franco Rivera "come out" as a Firefighter For 9/11 Truth who points out how various policymakers spoke of a "new Pearl Harbor" as the first step toward an American-dominated world. These views are shared by his actor, Daniel Sunjata.
• The Sopranos also deals with the post 9/11 environment in an interesting way. It started by doing the standard thing: removing the Twin Towers from the intro montage of Tony driving from New York to his home in suburban New Jersey. But then it starts to realistically discuss the effects it would have on Tony's world, as Dwight Harris, the FBI Agent that had chased him for several seasons, is re-assigned to Anti-Terrorism. Tony then spends the remainder of the series trying to cultivate a relationship with him in order to trade info about potential terrorists (the only snitching his colleagues will tolerate) for leniency in the ongoing investigations into his syndicate.
• Spooks spends its first, pre-9/11, series focusing on MI5 dealing with internal threats. Subsequent series focus more (but not exclusively) on international threats and Islamic terrorism, until series 5, when it becomes a Conspiracy Thriller.
• Standoff brings us the episode "Man of Steele", in which the eponymous radio shock jock has a man on the line who takes a woman hostage. When Emily tries to reason that the FBI is trying to find the woman who scammed him Steele scoff, "Yeah, right, the FBI couldn't find 19 known terrorists with box cutters." This quote is later seen on Lia's computer, who recorded Steele for when the FBI would step in to take him off the air, labelled 'September 12'.
• Mentioned briefly in the first few episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah and John jump from the 1990s to present day, thus completely skipping over the 9/11 attack. Sarah goes to get a new identity forged, and she is told that it will be harder after the attack. She speculates that if she hadn't time-jumped straight through it, that she would've thought it'd be the end.
• The Twilight Zone (2002): The remake of the original series' "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" has the neighborhood on Maple Street be paranoid over a terrorist attack rather than an alien invasion like in the original. Besides that, the plot is mostly unchanged.
• Although The West Wing never deals with 9-11 specifically (although this is arguably justified by it being set in what is in many ways quite clearly an Alternate History; it's quite possible that the attacks simply never happened in that universe), it often deals heavily and frequently with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the seasons following 9-11; "Isaac and Ishmael", a non-canon episode written, filmed and aired within three weeks of the attacks, deals with Islamic terrorism, and a running plot in the third and fourth seasons deals with the fallout from an attempt by a Qurac-sponsored terror group to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge.
• The FBI as shown in The Wire has shifted its priorities away from drug crime, leaving the overmatched Baltimore PD to handle it alone. In fact, the only way they can get Federal help in most seasons is to baldly lie to the Feds to tie their investigation to a Terror case. Interestingly enough, the writers actually predicted that the real FBI would do the exact same thing, since the pilot was written months in advance of the FBI's move towards dealing mostly with terrorism.

Multiple Media

• After 9/11, G.I. Joe merchandise and programs took the "terrorist" out of Cobra's description as a "ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world".

Video Games

• A related trend during the 2000s was the Post-9/11 Military Game, which had you playing as a Western soldier or operative fighting terrorists in the Middle East or in other global hot zones. The First-Person Shooter genre especially was dominated by such games, with the more science fiction-inspired settings popular in The '90s falling by the wayside outside of a few standard-bearing franchises. At the genre's peak, they were often compared, by both their fans and their critics, to the gung-ho, Patriotic Fervor-driven war movies that Hollywood made during and after World War II.
  • Command & Conquer: Generals was one of the first games in this vein to come out. Notably, it provides a (canonical!) campaign for the terrorist faction, the Global Liberation Army, together with those of the American and Chinese heroes. Also of note is how, despite coming out in 2003, the game wound up being scarily prescient of the rise of the Islamic State a decade later, with many of their tactics being mirrored in the GLA.
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the Trope Codifier. While the Big Bad turns out to be a Russian ultranationalist, most of the action concerns an unnamed (but geographically located in Mesopotamia) Middle Eastern petrostate that the US has invaded and which has gotten its hands on a nuclear weapon — one that is even led by a dictator named al-Asad^note The name of a US airbase in Iraq, and one letter away from the name of the family that has controlled Syria since 1971, that country seen at the time as one that the US might invade next after Iraq. Later Modern Warfare games diverged from this, though, inspired more by techno-thrillers with a story about World War III between NATO and Russia.
  • Army of Two goes for the third. One cutscene is of 9/11, and a lot of the game has you fighting al-Qaeda, who are even mentioned by name.
  • The 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor, and its 2012 sequel Warfighter, attempted to do a straightforward, realistic shooter take on The War on Terror, much as previous games had done with World War II, without the embellishments that Modern Warfare had brought with it.
  • Blacksite: Area 51 combined the post-9/11 military game with the sort of sci-fi shooters that the genre had displaced. Much of the story is a satire of the militarism of the US after 9/11, with the armed forces overstretched by multiple wars and turning to the Reborn program, its ranks taken from convicts, the homeless, illegal aliens, and soldiers without families, in order to have enough soldiers to fight its wars without having to bring back conscription (and thus infuriate voters and destroy support for the war effort). The first level also takes place in Iraq.

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• A Visual Novel, Broken Hearted: A 9/11 Story, was released in 2006, the same year as United 93 and World Trade Center. It takes the second route, and despite the rough art, it is surprisingly touching.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto IV is set in a fictionalized pastiche of New York City in the 2000s, and heavily mines the post-9/11 mood of the city for both its story and its satire. In GTA IV, elements of The War on Terror and the neoconservative/jingoistic political climate of the Bush era are very much present in the game's storyline here and there. In fact, the theme of terrorism plays a significant role in the game's narrative. For instance, when working for the U.L. Paper contact, you have to confront literal Russian terrorists. One mission even requires you to dispose of a North Korean mob boss who counterfeits dollars and directly serves the interests of North Korea. The reason you have to eliminate him? Because you have to serve the interests of the U.S., and what he's doing isn't good for the economy. Dimitri Rascalov himself, the Big Bad of the entire story, is treated as a high-profile national threat, even going so far as to commit acts that could very well be classified as narco-terrorism, such as launching a large-scale nation-wide cocaine operation that threatens to destabilize the nation and orchestrating an attack on a senator's convoy to silence his campaign.
  • As with the previous game, The War on Terror plays a significant role in some portions of Grand Theft Auto V. Merryweather Security goes from a small-time security firm to a full-on private military company thanks to making bloody profits on conflicts in the Middle East, and are now one of the most powerful entities in the United States. The FIB and IAA both exhibit paranoia and fear akin to their real-life counterparts over Islamic terrorism, and Weazel News is quick to report on any potential un-American activities or threats. Many of the in-universe politicians cite an end to the War on Terror, either peacefully or through evermore security and policing, as their campaign qualities. This makes a lot of sense and reflects the time quite well, considering that GTA V is set in The New '10s during the Obama era, a period when the first signs of the Pyrrhic Victory of the War on Terror in Iraq were observed, and the war was becoming increasingly unpopular worldwide. This negativity is vividly reflected in the Cold-Blooded Torture mission, where you are the interrogator.
• The Inciting Incident of inFAMOUS is an explosion the reduces 1/3 of Empire City (which is basically New York) that people immediately assume was a terrorist attack, there's a Conspiracy Theorist who thinks that the government orchestrated the attack (with Cole being in on it and having purposefully set it off), and two games later, conduits are relabeled "bioterrorists" as they become more and more commonplace.

Webcomics

• One of the first long-running storylines in Nip and Tuck involves Nip Todd getting the role as the lead for an action film inspired by The War on Terror. The director's original script is distinctly anti-military, revolving around a crooked politician hoping to frame an innocent Muslim community for acts of terrorism (with bioweapons!) to further drum up support for the War on Terror, only to be stopped by an INS agent who learns of the plan and goes rogue to stop it. As Nip himself firmly supports the War on Terror, and the rest of the actors turn out to be fellow conservatives all blacklisted from the Screen Actor's Guild for their political views, they make a plan to secretly reshoot the movie as pro-military instead. Outing the director for his planned version, they make so much off of the movie that they go on to found their own indie movie company.

Web Videos

• The Mysterious Mr. Enter argues that Period Piece Turning Red should have been more akin to a movie of The Second period, in that the spectre of 9/11 should have had some bearing on the 2002-set movie. Instead, there's no mention of it whatsoever, which he claims undermined the point of making it a Period Piece at all, despite it taking place in Canada with a focus on teenage girls.

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