Well made and only partly predictable.

Rating: Null/10 (1 October 2006)

I went into the cinema without expecting anything in particular. Technically it was excellent, and I did like the way in which the film shows the events through the eyes of the officers. It shies away from showing the actual moments of impact and from over-dramatising the terrible things that were happening to those people up in the towers themselves. However; having avoided some clichés it then shoots itself in the foot with lines like "mommy, when is daddy coming back?" and with the closeups of a Christian cross and representations of a back-lit and glowing Jesus Christ. Maybe the humour was in the water bottle.
For me the most poignant moment of drama was not the interminably drawn out suffering of the cops under their slabs of foam painted to look like concrete but the encounter towards the end between Maria Bello's character and the woman who was coming to terms with the loss of her (son ?). That moment did seem more real than any other.
Overall, the film left me thinking about how these films, even from the best directors, are generically about the triumph of human hope and endeavour. At least this one was only partly predictable. After all the agonising, everybody involved with the two rescued officers gave us an uplifting and happy dénouement but the immense suffering of thousands of others on that terrible day was confined to a few brief moments and a few "summing up" captions at the end. The officers were spared and so were we. Perhaps we should like the film for that very reason.