I once asked a history professor and pop culture expert where I work if it was really “too soon” for Hollywood to start releasing movies about 9/11. He told me that films like United 93 and World Trade Center “are different, because so many Americans watched the attacks happen in ‘real time,’ in all their harrowing, uncensored intensity. In a way, we’ve already seen the ultimate 9/11 movie – on the day itself. Many Americans may simply feel that a film couldn’t add anything to their own emotional understanding of 9/11 – and that, in fact, a film might actually alter or detract from that understanding. That’s what’s driving the criticism of 9/11 movies…that they threaten to revise the public memory of [the day].” When I settled into my seat to take in World Trade Center, then, I was prepared for a Hollywoodized, less-than-the-truth departure from what really happened five years ago. And, thanks in large part to the efforts of director Oliver Stone, I saw exactly that, and it’s far from what I wanted.
Mercifully, World Trade Center doesn’t try to make a statement about conspiracy theories, nor does it weigh viewers down with the aftermath of the attacks. It focuses on John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William Jimeno (Michael Peña), Port Authority officers who were trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center and were two of the last survivors rescued from Ground Zero. The movie trades between scenes of John and William as they struggle to survive and their families as they scratch for any news about their loved ones.
Left to those two devices, the film would have been a powerful and moving tale that captured a small bit of what 9/11 was like for those it affected most. But Stone and screenwriter Andrea Berloff put in needless flashbacks that, while they may be what the officers were thinking about, take viewers out of the moment. At one point, Jimeno has a vision of Christ, and while the sentiment is beautiful, the execution on screen is laughable.
Of course, the events of the movie are deeply saddening, and it’s draining to watch. Even so, the experience of watching the film could have been more extreme. Instead, Stone’s direction left it lifeless.
Rating: * * 1/2 of 5