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11 Minutes – America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting, review: gruelling watch neglects the bigger picture

The mass shooting at Las Vegas's Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017 saw 58 people killed and more than 800 injured - Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
The mass shooting at Las Vegas's Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017 saw 58 people killed and more than 800 injured - Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Las Vegas is a city built on excess, a place where anything goes. It felt grimly apt that on October 1, 2017, it became the site of the USA’s worst mass shooting, too. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old from Mesquite, opened fire from the window of his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, into the crowd of the Route 91 Harvest festival, where 20,000 people were gathered to watch the country music star Jason Aldean.

In total he fired more than 1,000 rounds into the panicked crowd below, injuring 868 people – at least 400 by gunfire – killing 58, plus two more who died later from their injuries. Then he turned a gun on himself. When police finally got into his room, they found a vast arsenal, which Paddock had quietly assembled over several weeks.  

This awful story is the subject of 11 Minutes: America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting (BBC Two), a four-part documentary series. Opening with a monologue by Storme Warren, a radio host, about the difficulty of bearing witness to such an event, 11 Minutes uses the extensive footage from phones and body cameras, along with a dozen or so interviews with people caught up in the shooting, to build a comprehensive picture of what it felt like from the ground.

Country music star Jason Aldean was playing the festival at the time of the shooting - Chris Pizzello/AP
Country music star Jason Aldean was playing the festival at the time of the shooting - Chris Pizzello/AP

With so much documentary time to convey such brief real-life events, the effect is gruelling. Seconds are stretched into minutes. It’s obvious many – if not most – of the interviewees will be traumatised by the event for the rest of their lives.
As is fashionable today, the documentary – directed and produced by Jeff Zimbalist – shies away from naming the shooter for fear of lionising him and encouraging imitators. But its focus on the minutiae, while effective at building a sense of the terror of the time, comes at the expense of context.

There is no faulting the testimony, but after two hours I was struggling to understand what it was telling us, other than how hellish it is to be under fire. It is telling how quickly the men and women finding themselves under fire understand what is happening, so routine are mass shootings in the US. But a more zoomed-out view would require the documentary to ask how a man was able to slowly accumulate 24 firearms in a hotel room, which in America is a political question. It’s no disservice to the victims to say that this could be shorter but also broader.