Stone got it right for a change

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2006)

Before I review the film, understand that 9/11 wasn't something I experienced at a distance. I was in the WTC ten minutes before the first plane hit. When it hit, I was in my office right across the street. When the buildings came down, they ripped the windows off my entire building. My building was close enough that our ground floor level served as the morgue for the site. It was One Liberty. You can take a look and you'll be surprised how close. Wierdly, if you are into movies, when you watch The Siege with Bruce Willis, its our building that got the car bomb.
When the first plane hit, the building security told everyone to get to the other side of the building until further notice. When the second plane hit, I told our staff to get out. Go down the stairs, not the elevators, young ones help the old ones. I helped our last two older employees down 18 flights of stairs after locking the office. Not that locking mattered. Everything not nailed down that was worth anything was stolen within a few days anyway.
Down on the street, I stood in a crowd of thousands and watched several dozen people jump to their deaths. Everyone was crying. It never occurred to me that the buildings were going to come down. My impression was that it was a heck of a mess and I couldn't see how they were going to put out the fires. My instinct was to run to help. But I had a six month old and I stayed with our employees until I could convince them all to leave. Then I left. I'm not proud of that fact, but I also know that if I had gone to help, I'd be dead now. Two people who were debating doing the same thing with me died less than forty five minutes later.
In subsequent days, I was at Ground Zero many times, all related to work. No one went there for curiosity, not after the first time.
It smelled. The air was toxic. You could smell poison in the wind and the air was claustrophobic. They say that soldiers on the battlefield know the least about what's happening and that day, I can confirm it. There were rumors everywhere, that NY Downtown Hospital had been hit, that the White House had been bombed. I heard someone tell me that there had been assassinations. Everyone was confused because no one had the whole story. Not yet.
I'm not sure we still have it all. But that someone's plan involved the successful highjacking of four planes simultaneously...that sounds a little too ambitious to actually work.
I titled my review, "Oliver Stone got it right for a change." He really did. I've had a troubled relationship with Stone's movies in the past. He's a terrific filmmaker and its usually his lesser movies that get my attention. Platoon was good, but I'm not sure I've seen the definitive Vietnam movie yet. I think Platoon was more about war mythos than about the war itself. Maybe the best movie about the war was Born on the Fourth of July, but that was a Stone picture too. JFK was fun, but he admitted making up parts out of NOTHING. The Doors was an interesting character study, but I don't think for a moment that Val Kilmer was channelling Jim Morrisson. Alexander was horrible.
Having said that, Natural Born Killers, Salvador, Wall Street and U-Turn were excellent. Pure stories with the right balance of surrealism/realism, politics and drama. They told great stories in interesting ways.
Stone turns off the tricks here. The only trick on display is someone telling a human story amidst events so large that they dwarf everything else.
That day, it was what it was like. No one's story was big enough to notice on 9/11. The stories that made up the pastiche of the people's occurrences that day, they all melded into one big pot. That the pot is the collection of the stories, that is why I think America, as melting pot, is such a target for the terrorists. I believe they hate that we can pull off disparate views with such grace and elegance and Stone's movie makes a human story of an inhuman event.
I have trouble judging WTC as a movie. I think every actor did a fine job, particularly Nicholas Cage. The script was good, the effects perfect. Stone doesn't show the explosions but, after all, what would seeing them add to the human story.
But Stone's made me sit up and take notice. As much as I dislike some of his movies, I will always go see the new Oliver Stone film. Even when they don't work, they do it in the most interesting ways.
World Trade Center is the kind of movie if you wonder what it was like to be down there, at Ground Zero when the attacks came. Then it goes inside and we see the valiant efforts of men working to save lives.
Good movie and I will see it again