A Feel Good 9/11? I Think Not.

Rating: 1/10 (30 September 2006)

World Trade Center is the second 9/11 themed movie to be released in the wake of America's worst catastrophe and the first, Paul Greengrass's United 93, set the bar pretty high. Unfortunately, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is everything that United 93 is not. A big, polished, Hollywood picture filled with Tinseltown superstars; an emotionally manipulative monster that drags its audience down into the pits of hell and never really brings them back out again. United 93 left viewers angry and resolute; hardened into terrorism fighting steel. Stone's movie abandons its audience to quiet, miserable despair.
The film is based on the real life stories of two Port Authority police officers pulled from the buildings' rubble after their collapse. Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and rookie officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) are part of a team of first responders, and bravely they rush into Tower One to do their job. They're in the lobby of the building when millions of tons of steel and concrete comes crashing down on them. McLoughlin somehow has the presence of mind to use the two or three seconds they have left to lead his men through the tornado of falling death toward the building's elevator shaft, knowing it's the center of the building and their best chance to live. The world goes black, and when McLoughlin and Jimeno wake up they're buried under 20 feet of burning rubble. Somehow they've survived, but they're pinned under wreckage. Injured, suffering, and slowly bleeding to death they lay there together hoping for a chance at life.
Dave Karnes, this is the man the film should have been based on, that way it would have been a lot more, pleasing.
Stone's take on the World Trade Center attack is at first remarkably restrained. He never shows the planes hitting the buildings, only their shadows passing over confused New Yorkers. He doesn't indulge in the spectacle of the towers' collapse, instead he shows them from the inside as they heave onto the heads of doomed rescuers who themselves have no idea what's happened. The best parts of the film are an exercise in extreme claustrophobia, watching two men trapped and struggling to keep awake in the pits of a man made hell.
Is this a well made film? Yes. Perhaps more importantly, with a couple of exceptions, it's a respectful one. Yet unless you like feeling lost and hopeless, there's just no good reason to watch World Trade Center.
To Sum up, This film is 129 min of pain, it shows two men, under tons amount of rubble for....129 minutes.... Will they survie? I'm sure you know the answer to that. Don't watch this film.