A Respectful, Well Made Movie - But Why Was It Made?

Rating: 5/10 (11 August 2006)

I feel I must start by saying that none of us are really qualified to determine how long one must wait before attempting to cover material such as this. It is entirely conceivable that if we were to wait until everyone 'got over' this event before dramatizing it, we'd be waiting for life.
With that said, I must question the making of this movie. Stone was obviously very concerned about scratching the open wounds of victim families, because he removed (tastefully I might add) quite a bit of material that could have been used to make the events of the day a lot more harrowing to the viewer. When I say more harrowing, I of course must add that it is nearly impossible to be more unsettling in the re-telling of this story than the news coverage of the day had already been real-time. I merely refer to the use of intense sound and imagery to place the audience under the planes when they hit and in and around the buildings when they came down.
The decision to acknowledge the actual airliner impact with nothing more than a passing shadow and a rumble was BRILLIANT. Brilliant because the scene was far more concerned with showing what was happening in regular lives at the time, and in doing so only amplified the impact of the terrible and abrupt interruption of sanity that occurred. I believe that the showing of the planes crashing would have been far too Airport '77 and amateur.
The actual sequence depicting the collapse of Tower 1 was extremely frightening, both in imagery and sound quality. The sound of millions of tons of building coming down on the heads of the characters was bone chilling, overwhelming, and positively deafening. The delivery of the sound was top notch, as was the stylistic way it contrasted so suddenly with the absolute silence in the very next scene, when the characters began their hellish ordeal trapped under ten stories of debris. Stone and his crew had an incredible understanding of the use of sound to create dread, as additionally experienced throughout the trapped sequences when every thundering rumble meant additional structure collapse whose finality could not be determined from the vantage point of the characters.
Both leads did incredible jobs of riding the ragged edge of insanity as one would expect to do when it appears there's little more left to do but die, and die trapped in a claustrophobic hell hole with unanswered questions galore. I thought that Maggie Gyllenhaal was excellent as a pregnant wife who appeared to have been a 'can do' type person through September 10th, and who was reduced to a helpless mess one day later. I was less impressed with Maria Bello until I realized that she had the difficult job of portraying a character who had checked out of her marriage and spent the entire ordeal requiring cues from her surrounding family to realize the real value of what she stood to lose.
The scene with Jesus toting an Envian bottle, although I understand where it was going, was a bit much. I mention this only because everything in this movie had the feeling of being very deliberate - as though the makers thought the movie's worth would be evaluated on a scene by scene basis. Similarly, the G.I. Joe - like blurb uttered proudly by one of the characters upon discovery of the two officers seemed more like a product placement for the Marines than anything else. I admit, these are petty concerns about small, arguably insignificant plot devices in the movie, but with their insignificance in mind, why not just leave them out if they're not as manipulative as they appear to be if for no other reason than to avoid interpretations like mine?
And thus, we return to the central question of this review. What was this for? No revelations are to be had as a result of the material; everyone knows what happened. One cannot claim that Stone was pulling out all stops to place viewers on scene; too much was sanitized. An easy cop-out would be to say the movie was made as a 'thank you for the sacrifice', or as yet another suck up attempt directed at New York emergency personnel. But are any of these conclusions correct?
Who knows, but for my two cents, I say the following. If a movie like this is to be done, do it all. Acts of terrorism are violent and people are killed as a result. If you pick violence as a subject of a movie, do not then attempt to shield the viewer from that violence because in doing so, you have shielded the viewer from the movie's raison d'etre, nullified its effectiveness and what d'ya know - it's refund time again. If you are more concerned about hurting people's feelings than making an unflinching movie, than don't make the movie, because people are GOING to be hurt by a rehashing of these events.
Overall, a nice, neat, incredibly P.C. film that would have been no less effective if they had merely displayed the title on screen for the entire two plus hours. Hence the 5 of 10 rating. You simply can't stand on two sides of a fence at one time. Unless you have really, REALLY long legs...