"World Trade Center"? Yeah, right.

Rating: 2/10 (13 August 2006)

I don't think this movie comes too soon. I don't really think this movie is an insult to victims. I don't think this movie is a cheap exploitation of emotion...
I simply think this movie sucks... because it's typical bad film-making. Where's the story? For a movie titled "World Trade Center", you'd expect it to chronicle the existence of the WTC, its destruction, and the stories of the people involved (You know, kind of like what that little film "Titanic" did for the ship of the same name). Instead, this movie should've been called "Two Guys Trapped on 9/11" because that's all it's really about. We learn nothing about the World Trade Center, nor do we discover anything new about the 9/11 attacks. All we see are two guys with extremely typical families that go to the Twin Towers after either one or two planes hit them (the movie is vague about this for some reason), they put on some gear and then don't really do anything. They hang around the lobby, then one tower comes down and they get buried in rubble. For the rest of the movie, they're lying around in dirt swapping the most cliché dialogue about how they need to hold on and who has how many kids back home. They also warn each other about the dangers of falling asleep (which is good, because sadly that's what the audience is about to do at this point).
As for the rest of the events of that day, we see nothing of them. The people trapped on the top floors, what was going through their minds as they made the decision to jump 100 stories, the firefighters traveling up the stairwells as the building collapsed, the people aboard the planes as they crashed, the folks trapped in the elevators... (for god's sake, I heard about a janitor stuck in an elevator shaft who escaped by chipping a hole through a wall with his squeegee! That alone could've made for a more interesting movie...) I mean seriously, no offense to McLoughlin and Jimeno, but theirs was far from the most interesting or emotional story of that day. They experienced suffering and terror, but so did thousands of others on a greater scale and it's kinda cheap to take just that one story and slap on the title "World Trade Center" as if we've been shown even a fraction of a percent of the stories of the WTC and 9/11.
And the sadder part is that the movie didn't even do Jimeno and McLoughlin's story justice. With the way this film told the story, I ended up not caring much for the men and even less for their families. The acting was fine, but the manner in which the story was told (for which I hold writer, editor & director responsible) made me feel nothing. There was some humor at the most inappropriate times and Cage's end voice-over came out of left field and attempted to tack on some kind of theme that was supposed to exist throughout the film (as the score was trying to suggest) but it felt forced and irrelevant.
The cinematography is mediocre at best. I've seen the Naudet brothers' 9/11 documentary; they captured the REAL THING as it happened LIVE, like Tower 2 collapsing as they filmed from inside the lobby of Tower 1 and it's absolutely ridiculous that their footage was more coherent than Stone's. Most of the movie looked like it was shot on a sound stage since we basically never see the World Trade Center in its entirety. All we see are closeups and random rubble.
Stone had millions of dollars and over 2 hours of finished film time to tell just one of the countless stories of 9/11... he totally blew it and to add insult to injury, titled this half-assed work "World Trade Center". Give me a camera and 2 hours to talk to just one survivor of the attacks and I will give you a better movie than this major disappointment.