A classless play on emotions

Rating: 1/10 (12 August 2006)

I know that many people who don't like this movie say so just because they thought it was made at an inappropriate time. Personally, I hated this movie on its own merit as poor film-making. It seems that Oliver Stone just decided he wanted to make a movie, any movie, about 9/11, and didn't care about the content of the movie. The end result was a movie of such pitiful quality that one could go though the script and replace the term "police officer" with "miner" and "World Trade Center" with "a coal mine" and the entire script would work perfectly as a cave-in disaster movie. It's that generic. Stone tries to carry the movie just by showing how sad the families were and how scared the policemen were, meanwhile allowing the audience no interesting plot points to hold on to, nor any significance to the tragedy. In the end, I have to conclude that Oliver Stone just wanted to get some cheap emotional reactions from the crowd, because at one point the movie says that it is about the potential for good in humanity and how strong we can be in the face of adversity. Stone quickly forgets this, because only about 15% of the movie even shows people coming together to help one another. The other 85% of the movie is spent watching the families argue or seeing flashbacks to their happy memories, which is a good way to get audience reaction but hardly lends any significance or depth to the plot. I don't in any way want to belittle the pain that these families had to endure, which is why I am disappointed that that pain was exploited to make a bad movie. September 11 was the most important and tragic event in my lifetime, and I think it deserves more respect than to be made into a generic, poorly-written disaster movie less than five years after it happened.