Pretty good despite being flawed in some ways and also getting a head start emotionally as a drama due to the subject matter

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2007)

The morning of 11th September 2001 started just like any other for the police officers on duty in the Port Authority. However when a plane flies into one of the World Trade Centre towers, the majority of units are mobilised to respond. Sergeant McLoughlin and a small group of men go into the tower to try and rescue survivors from the floor above. Still at the foot of the towers when the first building collapses, McLoughlin's men are swamped and soon it is only him and rookie Jimeno left alive trapped in a small cavern below the rubble.
Hard film to really review and judge this one. On one hand I was clearly moved and engaged by parts of it to the point where I did have to wipe away tears, but on the other hand, witnessing the death of thousands on live television and reliving those thoughts and feelings will hopefully always draw that reaction from me  not just for the deaths on the day but for the world we have lived in and the countless deaths that arguably happened as a result of this day. And that is pretty much how it was with this because I did find it hard to disconnect the wider topic from the story of the two men trapped. Perhaps this was the intension of Stone, to avoid replaying the footage we have all seen but instead make it a human story. If so then he succeeded but in doing so he didn't achieve the (perhaps impossible) task of making me treat this as just the story I was being told.
This I found some of the flashbacks to be dull and quite unnecessary, filling in the lives of characters who really I already cared about  not as individuals perhaps but as receptacles holding a lot of other souls within them, while some of the family sequences were perhaps a bit too heavy and long for their own good. The film is at its best when it is depicting the scale of the losses while also highlighting the humanity of the response (well, initial response) from people from everywhere. It is unavoidably sentimental at times but mostly I was impressive by how it generally avoided mawkishness and really pushing buttons. I was worried for other reasons when I learned Stone was making the film  because of his track record of how he approaches subjects  but in the end the film is directly really well, handling the subject sensitively without reducing its impact and working well with the darkness and close-ups of the trapped men.
The cast are mostly good and I do think that the same material delivered by lesser actors could easily have seen it plummeting to the level of daytime TV melodrama but you can see the effort the majority put into making this as genuine as they can. Cage gives a good performance and, these days, that should be sufficient praise. OK he is pinned and limited but he does what is asked of him. Peña I liked more as he had more expression and screen to work with. Shannon was effective and tough as Dave Karnes  and the film is kind enough to not explore his instant thoughts of war and revenge for fear it would leave a sour taste now that we are neck deep in Iraq; equally Dorff and Whaley give good "heroic ordinary guy" late in the film. Being in the families was a tougher job for the cast as this is the side that could have been soapy. Casting Gyllenhaal and Bello seems like the best way of countering that and indeed that is just what they do, making real their characters.
Not a perfect film by any means then, because it does drift into soap opera and it does rather feel that we never get into the focused story within the bigger one, no matter how tightly it pulls the narrative around it. Still good and better than it easily could have been, but the real events do help by providing the emotion and shock already built in to the audience.