reinforces the Biggest Lie of the last five years, - that in Iraq, we are fighting those who attacked our country.

Rating: 2/10 (18 August 2006)

Ruth Rosen said it best:
When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.
I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie reinforces the Big Lie - endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media - that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
It might surprise you that this Oliver Stone film is neither ideological, nor conspiratorial, which in my view is just as it should be. Instead, it is a portrayal of what the men who braved hell and the families who anguished over their survival experienced.
World Trade Center gives 9/11 a distinctly human face by following two Port Authority policemen and their families. We watch the men muster their courage to help evacuate people in one of the towers; we gasp as they are buried alive; we wince as heavy slabs of cement crush their bodies; and we hold our breath as they struggle to keep each other going in the face of imminent death.
Expert editing brings us the anguish suffered by their wives, children, and relatives. Some are in denial, others in shock. Some have faith; others are resigned to the men's deaths. They live in their own hell and we empathize with their wrenching agony.
Meanwhile, Stone introduces us to one ex-Marine who feels called by God to help rescue those buried alive. He gets his hair cut short, puts on his old uniform, and with all the authority of a former staff sergeant, does what he knows best - uses his military skills to save people's lives. Determined and angry, he insists that we must avenge this horrendous attack.
And yet, in none of these profoundly moving scenes is there even a mention of who might have committed this atrocity. Neither the name AL-Qaeda, nor Osama Bin Laden, is so much as whispered.
Despite the near flood of documentaries on the terrorist attacks heading toward the small screen this September, Stone's film, for many Americans, may end up being the definitive cinematic record of what it felt like to be inside the hellish cyclone known simply by the numbers 9/11.
To offer a faithful recreation of that historical catastrophe, however, Stone owed viewers the whole truth, not merely a brilliant, graphic portrayal of what happened and how it affected the lives of some of those involved.
As it ends, a written postscript appears that describes what happened to the buried Port Authority policemen, their families, and the ex-Marine who helped rescue them (whose last line is: "We're going to need some good men out there to revenge this"). We learn that the two men survived an unbearable number of surgeries and are living with their families. Next we read that the ex-Marine re-upped and later did two tours of duty in Iraq. At that moment, I wanted to shout out, "Don't you mean Afghanistan?"
That evening, I wrote the words that should have appeared in the postscript: "Government officials later confirmed that the organization which plotted the destruction of the World Trade Center was AL-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian, and Ayman AL-Zawahiri, an Egyptian. Nineteen men executed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of them came from Saudi Arabia; the remaining four from Egypt, The United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon. None of them came from Iraq."
This is the tragic failure of Stone's World Trade Center. It undercuts the historical value of the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the last five years, still believed by far too many Americans - that in Iraq, we are fighting those who attacked our country.
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