A sense of eeriness runs throughout the History Channel’s World Trade Center: A Modern Marvel. How could it not? There’s something ghostly about this program, released this month to DVD and VHS.

This profile of the New York buildings was almost completed when Sept. 11 rolled along, and rehashes the creation of the structures and the thinking behind their design.
One doesn’t think of History Channel docs as shocking, but it is indeed shocking to see people interviewed while titles reveal a couple of them have been missing since Sept. 11 and presumed dead. Especially when one of these WTC employees is discussing how convinced he is that the buildings could withstand the impact of several jet liners. There are Titanic overtones, for sure.

Despite this jarring irony, though, the doc shies away from any kind of depth. There is no mention, for example, of the massive controversy surrounding the buildings. Architecture critics disdained the twin towers for years; many New Yorkers complained bitterly about them, saying they were as ugly as they were big. George F. Will once wrote a column in which he daydreamed about planes flying into them (he’s since refused to discuss the column and its bizarre prescience).

The definitive doc on these buildings and their surreal place in history has yet to be made. :

—Matthew Hays