Disaster Movie in every possible sense

Rating: 2/10 (11 September 2011)

As part of RTE's excellent coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, they showed World Trade Center as the Midweek Movie. I normally love to slaughter terrible films, but the subject manner of this and the presence of World's Greatest Actor Nicolas Cage meant I went into this hoping to be moved by it. Sadly this was not to be the case. 9/11 may be the most important event of the last 20 years but this felt like a made-for-TV disaster movie from the early 80's starring Paul Newman, whose expressions throughout the film manage to convey both the boredom of "contractual obligation" and fear of "career suicide".
The film starts promisingly enough,with the calm before the storm of the morning on 9/11 being conveyed with an appealing sense of menace(planes flying overhead, a rundown of the firemen so you can guess who will be dead by the end, family lives established). However, the disaster is fairly poorly handled, with the insertion of archive footage of the attack making it look more like a 50's B-Movie than Oliver Stone probably intended.
Once the firefighters are trapped under, the film takes a horrible turn for the melodramatic, with Nicolas Cage's gloriously entertaining overacting style being a terrible fit to the character of an ordinary man in a nightmarish situation. His shrieking and shouting bring to mind the infamous "THE BEES" scene from the 2006 "The Wicker Man" remake (possibly the best film I've ever seen remade as possibly the worst film I've ever seen.) rather than any actual fear or pain.
The family lives of the two men are every bit as ridiculous, with the obligatory small-child-makes-the-parent-see-the-truth scene, which is so badly handled here that it makes your skin crawl. Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal do what they can with the characters, who are so underwritten as to be cast-offs from US daytime soaps with dialogue to match, with every line written to maximise hysterics and manipulate emotions. I find it hard to believe that the firemen's wives on 9/11 went through the whole day with perfect hair and make-up.
As well as this,the film's attempts to convey the scale of the attacks are cringeworthy, with CGI shots pulling away to indicate the smoke from Ground Zero billowing into space having the feeling of a music video. The film's main redeeming characteristic comes in noticing the smaller details of the chaos of the day,such as deserted supermarkets and people covered in dust in police station waiting rooms. Had it focused more on this, it could well have been a better film ,rather than the schizoid mess of disaster movie blockbuster and serious drama we ended up with, with the worst aspects of both and none of the best. It's like a 70's disaster movie but not even fun. In fact "TERRORIST!" starring George Kennedy would probably have been a better film. In fact if you'd edited 9/11 footage into The Towering Inferno starring the now-dead Steve McQueen and Paul Newman it'd be a better film.
There is one film that gets what 9/11 must have been like for those there on the day. It's from 2006 as well, and it's called United 93, focusing on the passengers of the United 93 flight which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. It has none of the gloss which so disastrously mars World Trade Center, and is all the better for not using recognisable actors, CGI or attempting to give the audience any spectacle. 9/11 is a lot better served by such fare than nonsense like this.