Amazingly uninspired

Rating: 1/10 (5 November 2007)

With a tragedy as large as this, and a bucket-of-possible-plots as filled as this, it's quite disturbing to see Oliver Stone hit his low-point of his entire career on this exact project.
With a mere fifth of the runtime away, we have our heroes in distress, with little to no character buildup been done to carry us through the last four-fifths of cinematic pain with any kind of relation to the characters put on the screen.
It's as if the story is so well-known that the script writer sees no point in drawing out the basics, which is perfectly understandable as you'd have to be literally dead to not know a heck of a lot about 9/11, and that counts for Americans and Eskimos alike. What is disturbing is that it sees no point in drawing out a story for us in which we get to know the characters on screen, either. The entire runtime seems to be wasted on emotional porn of such low quality that you start to wish for the people on screen to die soon so that the end credits will come and rescue you. You don't know who they are, what they're like, who they know, not even what their names are, and yet you've been staring at them for hours. The only thing letting you know that they're "the good guys" is the ever-present string ensemble playing fiddle for them all along.
This movie presents no story, no character buildup, no suspense, no action sequences (expecting to see the towers fall in state-of-the-art CGI wonder? Forget it, what you get are the shadow of a plane on the ground, and the sound of tower 2 falling, plus some rubble, that's it), no nothing, really.
This movie is so superficial it's impossible to say what it really wants to say, if anything. The problem is, it says nothing, and it takes more than two hours of it to accomplish that.