The day the world stood still

Rating: 7/10 (9 August 2006)

NOTE: I'd like to thank my sister Cynthia for her complementary comments.
When very young kids go to school someday, one of the questions that their teachers will ask is : "Ask to your parents where they were on September 11, 2001?" A similar question which was asked in the past was: "Where were you on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered?"
For those who lived through this day (including me), we will always remember where we were when we learned the news. In my case, I was in a biology class in my high school when my teacher came up in the class with these news on this Tuesday in September.
The day (and the entire week, should I precise it) has been a day where television took an almost-unprecedented importance, in my small city as well as in any other place on the planet. Because the terrifying scenes of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon instantly entered into the collective memory and the horror of these scenes was even greater than the first time that moviegoers saw Anthony Perkins stabbing Janet Leigh in "Psycho".
There will never be a movie which will surpass and the emotion and the feelings experienced live on 9/11. I don't mean that there won't be any good movie about 9/11 but it won't be worth the images broadcast millions of times by CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX...
So why would anyone produce a film like "World Trade Center"? With a director like Oliver Stone (who likes to draw the attention), we could have doubted that it was another publicity shot from the famous filmmaker, as were "Platoon", "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers".
The film's story is very simple and could be summarized in one sentence or two. The movie is about two NYPD policemen who found themselves under the WTC rubble on 9/11 and their families who pray for a miracle.
This script is rather unusual for a politicized director like Oliver Stone. The last time that Stone examined so much the human side of a drama in one of his movies, it's probably in "Platoon" in 1986. By the way, this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture on that year.
Stone can thank his principal actors. Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña are the two officers trapped under the ruins and Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhall are their respective spouses. The four of them offer a touching and emotionful interpretation.
The movie alternates for almost 90 minutes on three plans: the two policemen, Cage's family and Peña's family. Stone succeeds in giving a fair dose of suspense even when we know since the beginning that at the end, they're gonna come through alive.
The movie begins very slowly but the approach is ingenious. Stone takes his time before showing the main characters, only to show the city and its citizens getting up on that morning. At that moment, nobody suspects anything. People are busy getting to the job, opening their shops or chatting about Derek Jeter's performance during the weekend game. This approach only wants to show that every extraordinary day always begins like a very ordinary day.
The picture that always come to my mind in the movie is the one where the man on the boat watches the twin towers. Was he suspecting that they would disappear completely before the end of the morning? We must admit that the entire film is slow and could annoy many viewers. But it remains nevertheless a very personal and very touching vision from Stone's part and even if it's not his best picture, it's way better than the "Alexander" flop two years earlier.
"World Trade Center" is one of a few stories which shows pictures that TV stations didn't show. The collapse of one of the towers on the rescuers is terribly catchy and the pictures shot from under the rubble are amazingly realistic. The pseudo-patriotic mood at the end is not really appreciated and the police officers' reaction when the first images are shown on TV is disappointing, but these mistakes are easily forgivable.
For a movie so hard to make, this is a very acceptable result. For sure, nothing is comparable to the actual pictures, but those from Stone's film work where they have to work. That's a very good 9/11 flick.