Like most Americans, I sat glued to the television screen in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The most vivid clip I remember showed a group of pedestrians fleeing down a Manhattan street as a cloud of dust closed in behind them.

My immediate thought was: “Those special effects are so fake!”

Having never seen a building actually collapse upon a city full of people before, the only way my mind knew how to judge the event was against special effects from fiction depicting alien attacks and super-earthquakes. Against that yardstick, they looked at once both unreal and more terrifying.

Michal Kosakowski created a short film called Just Like the Movies that depicts the September 11 attacks using scenes from films.  Some of the clips feature alien ships and other obvious anachronisms, but the timeline of events and the overall visual recall dramatically what really happened that day.