Actually a profoundly moving vignette helping with focus on a story too big to ever tell

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2015)

I watched this for the first time nine years on from its year of production and nearly 14 on from the actual event. Happily, I turned to the IMDb reviews only after seeing the film, and find it surprising how much negativity there is around. The destruction of the World Trade Centre is obviously too big a story to tell in any single film, and it is also a story that should not be told in that way - in a non-documentary film - ever. But that does not mean that the event should not be dealt with at all, and here the focus is primarily on a rescue - one of the very few, and the rescuers - of which there were very, very many, including the rather incongruous bunch presented in this (true-story) film. The fact that the act of terror took most of its victims outright in a variety of more or less horrible ways does not mean that we "crow" or paint a ludicrously optimistic picture if we focus in one film on people who were actually rescued. Nor does it mean that we paint an unsubtle, gung-ho picture if we view recreations of the work of the hundreds (thousands?) who risked their lives (and very definitely their health, given the severe pollution on site) in the desperate hope that more might be extracted from the rubble. Indeed, to me this was not a particularly jingoistic presentation (and one would not particularly expect one from Oliver Stone). But it is moving and does inspire patriotism for humanity, as opposed to merely the United States. This is inevitable, natural and right, given that these are recreations of real events, and happily full of the weird, chancy, ad hoc, eclectic features that real-life events almost always present. Ultimately, then, a true story is told in a moving way (how could it be otherwise, given the circumstances?), and there is no reason I can see to dismiss this film (as so many have seemed to) as exploitative, over-emotional, over-patriotic or too inclined to focus on the few survivors, or anything else. This is a story worth telling, needing telling, and I did still feel enlightened further as regards the catastrophic and barbarous September 11 events. These cannot be bad things...