Tweet

Comments (0)

 1 of 3

World Trade Center Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense and emotional content, some disturbing images and language) Genre: Drama Theater release: August 09, 2006 by Paramount Pictures Directed by: Oliver Stone Runtime: 2 hours 5 minutes Cast: Nicolas Cage (John McLoughlin), Michael Peña (Will Jimeno), Michael Shannon (Dave Karnes), Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno), Stephen Dorff (Scott Strauss), Frank Whaley (Chuck Sereika), Dave Thomas (William Mapother) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If you had to pick a director to make the first major, big-budget, star-studded Hollywood movie about the September 11 terrorist attacks—and an inspirational movie, at that, about the heroism displayed by ordinary Americans that day—your first choice probably wouldn't be Oliver Stone. From JFK to Natural Born Killers, his politically-charged and occasionally conspiracy-minded films are better known for picking at the nation's wounds, rather than healing them. And yet, somehow, Stone has pulled it off with World Trade Center, which tells the story of two men who were rescued from the rubble of the twin towers. Rather than impose his vision on the story, Stone allows himself to become the conduit through which their story is told.

The film begins by depicting the sheer ordinariness of that morning, though a hint of Craig Armstrong's ominous score, and the way the camera keeps turning towards those towers on the horizon, lets us know the day won't stay that way. The characters, meanwhile, remain innocent of what is to come. Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) wakes up early and silently checks in on his sleeping children before going to work at the Port Authority Police Department. Fellow officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) also drives into Manhattan, and kids around with his colleagues in the locker room. The police are told to be on the lookout for a runaway girl, and Jimeno tells a homeless man not to loiter on public property. It's all very routine.

Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin

And then the first World Trade tower is struck. Stone, to his credit, does not go for the obvious money shots here; he does not mimic the news footage that we have all seen by recreating it with the latest developments in special effects. Instead, he depicts the first plane as a shadow cast against a New York skyscraper. The second plane is not depicted at all; instead, as McLoughlin, Jimeno and their colleagues make their way to the World Trade Center on a commandeered bus, one of them is told about the second attack while talking to his wife on his cell phone. The other officers don't believe him—surely there must be some mistake—but then the bus turns a corner and they find themselves staring at the evidence, down the road.

By restricting what we see and hear to what the characters saw and heard, Stone allows us to experience their confusion and bewilderment. But if he avoids the obvious images, he also creates new images which, in their own way, also draw us into their experience. We see papers fall from the sky like overgrown snowflakes, and horrific images of people plunging to their deaths in the distance. And as McLoughlin and his colleagues stand in front of the tower, we are struck by how incredibly huge it is, and by how small this tiny group of tiny men is.

Even so, undaunted by the sheer scale of their mission, McLoughlin, Jimeno, and a couple of their fellow officers enter the building—but they have barely had time to find the equipment they need before one of the towers collapses, burying them in rubble. And there they remain for the duration of the movie. One of their colleagues survives the collapse of the first tower, only to be killed when the second tower collapses and pours even more debris down upon them. So it is left to McLoughlin and Jimeno, pinned down several feet apart from each other and mostly unable to move, to keep each other awake and to hope for a rescue before they die.

Stone, working from a script by newcomer Andrea Berloff, alternates between the trapped men and their homes—sometimes showing, in flashback, what life was like before the attacks, and sometimes showing how the families of these men try to cope with the fact that they have no idea what has happened to their loved ones. There are odd moments of humor, such as when McLoughlin tells Jimeno that he must survive so that he can finish remodelling the kitchen for his wife Donna (Maria Bello), or when Jimeno recalls disagreeing with his pregnant wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) over what to name their next child; such concerns might seem trivial in the face of death or an attack against the nation, and yet there is value in such details, because it is through them that intimate relationships are forged.

next page... |  1 of 3 | last page