Twin Towers, the 2003 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short, finally comes to DVD, telling the true story of two brothers, a fireman and a policeman, who died when the World Trade Towers were destroyed.

It is easy to see why a film like this took top honors; the images alone are enough to make your hair stand on end. The short movie begins and ends with images of the airplanes striking the building and there is plenty of destruction and screaming to take us back to September 11, 2001. The images are what makes the film so powerful and luckily producer Dick Wolf ("Law and Order") was there filming a reality pilot about the police squad that would inevitably lose 14 of its men.

Twin Towers takes a brief look at the lives of Joseph and John Vigiano, a police officer and firefighter respectively, and interviews the men and family members that survived them. The filming for the television show had been going for quite some time, and so we get to see a rare look at these men long before they knew what their fates were going to be. They talk about always leaving home on a good note as you never know what the day is going to have in store for you - you may never come home.

Twin Towers is an effective documentary with some touching interviews and footage of "ordinary" men before they were killed in an instant. The emotional impact of the film is strong, but more can be credited to the images of the attacks than anything else. I can watch any news story on the subject and get the same hair-raising reaction; I don't know if I need a documentary to do the same thing.

Twin Towers tells the story of two men - or at least of their final months - and allows them to leave an extra footprint in history, but with the backdrop of September 11, emotions run high for other reasons.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.