World Trade Center

I honestly didn't think it was very good at all, though I respect the intentions of the filmmakers. Whatever one wants to say about Oliver Stone, he showed a commitment to faithfully telling the story of these two Port Authority cops trapped in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and their worried wives.

I liked a lot of the scenes in the beginning, the little mundane details like when Michael Pena's character is going about his everyday street beat. But the scenes at the WTC itself are really awkward, especially the cross-cutting between real footage and the actors. They just don't match, neither the film stocks nor the actors' reactions. A couple of moments with Pena standing there on the concourse were effective in creating a sense of horrific surrealism, and the moments right before the collapse were sudden and chilling...but overall it was not as powerful as I was expecting. For a film called World Trade Center, I guess I was expecting a little more context and not something focused so narrowly on these two Port Authority cops and an ex-Marine from Connecticut (as the only person outside these two cops' families whose story is told in the film, the focus on him reeks of jingoism in a GI Joe/Rambo vein).

I know it's a little unfair to compare this to United 93, but I need to in order to illustrate the point. U93 told a specific story (the experience of the passengers on the plane) and placed it within a context (what was happening with air traffic control and the military). The lessons that are demonstrated in the actions of the passengers are enhanced by contrasting them with the helplessness of the "professionals" responsible for their safety. It's telling a dramatically powerful story, conveying a theme , AND providing a larger historical context of what happened that day. Oliver Stone, by comparison, has failed to effectively tie the experiences of these two trapped cops with the larger events of the day, and his film suffers as a result. And in the end the film largely shortchanges the stories of the 2749 families who didn't get good news that day.

OK, so the film focuses on a narrow story of these two trapped cops and their families (and the gung ho marine, but he has limited screen time). Was their story well told? The scenes amidst the wreckage were compelling, but the back-and-forth with their wives became annoyingly schmaltzy. Yes, Maggie Gyllenhaal gave a strong performance as the pregnant wife and a lot of the moments with her family (esp the brief scene with the Colombian mother-in-law praying) were emotionally poignant, but so much of the family stuff was lame melodrama. And to be honest, even Maggie's performance was a little generic. I understand that these characters are all closely based on real life, but it still felt very Lifetime movie of the week. As for Maria Bello in the role of the other wife, I loved her in A History of Violence, but she was bland in this. The kid actors playing her children were mostly awful, and the film dragged whenever their story was on the screen. The resolution is mostly handled well, I really like what Oliver Stone is trying to convey about these small gestures of heroic goodness in the face of such desolation. But the power of these scenes is undermined by his tendency to pour on the sappiness while largely ignoring the greater horror of the day. It feels like a soap opera set against the greatest tragedy of our age, and that just doesn't work for me.

In short...not intense enough, not enough context, too much melodrama, not enough of a sense of reverence for what happened, highly impressive job of recreating the debris field, a charismatic performance from Maggie, overall a mediocre film.

Stone cold, that's what I call the new Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center. Taking the story of two Port Authority Police who survived, Stone manages to make the singular event of the last decade a boring made-for-TV story of two cops buried and waiting rescue, by the Marines no less. There are marks of an auteur to be sure such as the set design, just as authentic looking as when I visited ground zero after the attack. But the mark of the real Stone, one that carries the heft of his personal opinion about an event (Platoon) or his off-center look at history (JFK), is absent.

Let's face it: Two cops, John McLoughlin (Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), buried beneath rubble with small talk to keep themselves alive is neither great drama nor riveting suspense when you know ahead of time they are 2 of the 20 to be saved and their dialog doesn't come close to the bite of WWII film foxhole repartee. Cutting as often as he can to the dull families in New Jersey waiting for word about their lost loved ones, Stone still fails to make even this horrific event interesting.

As a matter of fact, he fails to put the event into its larger context of a world crisis that changes the way we live forever. It's a challenge to do so if you choose only a small part of the event, but a great director should be able to as Stone did, for instance, with Wall Street, where the shenanigans of one broker clearly represented a corrupt generation of self-centered consumers.

It's as if Oliver Stone promised Hollywood after his disastrous Alexander (which I liked) that he'd be a good boy and not editorialize about 9/11. Heck, point of view is Stone: Remember the conspiracy theory of JFK? Google "Loose Change" to get an introduction to 9/11 conspiracy theory and wonder why Oliver Stone couldn't have gone there rather than the straight way. Or at least part of the way.

"While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take. If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake!" Shakespeare, the Tempest

Oliver Stone salutes the ordinary heroes of this extraordinary circumstances. He puts himself way behind their stories, so far behind in fact that he is almost imperceptible. In Italy, the academics, snobs and other fauna dismissed it as rhetoric and banal. I have the words of the laid back "opinionist" Barbara Pallombelli accusing Stone of "inventing" How silly really. The ignorance between the cultures seems insurmountable sometimes. The story was told by the two men under the rubble and their families. They were working people, not professional "opinionists". They will hum the theme from Startsky and Hutch to keep themselves alive. I wonder what pseudo intellectual would have done.The film is a gripping depiction centered mostly on two men and their families. The event caused a catastrophe that is still growing, based mostly in personal interest and massive inter cultural ignorance. The film is not about that. The film is about the tiniest enormity of the domestic drama. I wept and longed for a private happy ending. The rest, well the rest is still part of our daily existence. Most of the detractors accuse World Trade Center of not being an Oliver Stone film, if he had done a classic Oliver Stone film he would have been accused of that. Stone will be controversial even for standing still. My hat to you Mr Stone, please keep going your own way.

This film is a mostly compelling story of the 9/11 attacks but the problem is that it's too drawn out. There is a lot of the time when nothing much is really happening. It tries to focus on the lives of particular individuals who are portrayed as heroes but this also means that there is not much material to work with.

Many good critical points have already been made about this film, but I'll just add that some historical events are better portrayed through documentaries and viewing real time news footage other than a Hollywood script.

This movie is an example of that.