Nothing you couldn't have seen in Life magazine

Rating: 1/10 (9 August 2006)

This movie makes a mockery of the attacks on Sept. 11 by squishing them into the most tired, toothless disaster-movie/family-values framework available to mankind. It is not about the attacks in any sense other than that the planes in NY serve as the movie's premise. The movie itself is simply a (long) longing for heroic spirit: every single character is as pure and un-nuanced as the most unimaginative American mind could possibly make them. It is a hymn to the ever-yearned-for triumph of the human spirit, marriage and, apparently, to Christianity, as only Jesus, a wife, and at least two children appear to be worth living for in this world. Oliver Stone is not half, not even a tenth of the man he used to be: this is a shameful, simple-minded work.