The terrorist attacks on 9/11 caused an urgent state of crisis to which America immediately responded by facilitating mythological narratives of masculine heroism. Such portrayals were not only evident in news broadcasts and political discourse, but in popular culture as well – a field in which scholars such as Susan Faludi, Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, and Terence McSweeney have contributed greatly. After the initial decade post 9/11, an abundance of films depicting the attacks and the ensuing war on terror had been produced. Such texts have had a profound influence in reshaping memories of the events. This process of how popular culture reconstructs the history of 9/11 and the war on terror is one which proceeds as long as works depicting it continue to be produced. This paper examines, analyzes, and discusses three war on terror films from the second decade post 9/11 and their belated response to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror: Zero Dark Thirty (2012), American Sniper (2014), and 12 Strong (2018). Theorists such as Robert Rosenstone, Quentin Skinner and Nils Arne Sørensen guide the analysis of each film. Despite their belated response, these films continue in the same vein as the heroic and victimizing narratives seen in previous years. As a collective force they contribute to a reimagining of the war by presenting it in simplistic protagonist-antagonist structure as well as by omitting or reducing several controversial topics of the conflicts in the Middle East.