Review: World Trade Center (2006)

As the lights dimmed in the theater where World Trade Center was playing, the idea of paying money to see a recreation of 9/11 struck me as absurd and insensitive. Yet, five years ago, on that infamous day, I knew I would eventually find myself sitting down in a darkened theater waiting for the Hollywood version to start, complete with buttered popcorn and a large Coke. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on what you go to the movies for) by limiting the scope of the story to the two trapped rescue officers and their families, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center comes off as a beautifully acted, expensive movie-of-the week played out on the big screen. The film manipulates like any good movie of the week, and it does it well, but its apolitical point-of-view hinders the larger message inherent to any discussion of that day. Where the Paul Greengrass film United 93 showed passengers on the frontline of a post 9/11 world, Oliver Stone delivers a film far removed from the charged issue of terrorism, draining away the social and geopolitical ramifications to focus instead on a life-affirming story typical to most survivor movies in which the human spirit triumphs over insurmountable odds.

The film opens with a loving montage of Manhattan waking up; blissfully unaware of what lies ahead. It is only during the ending of the montage that a title card announces the day to be September 11, 2001. Cognizant of the fact that most people watched the events unfold live on television, Stone relies on what the audience already knows about the day and avoids showing the towers attacked by the two hijacked planes. Instead, he uses television clips and strong sound design to describe the unfolding situation. For example, just before the first plane slams into the tower, he wisely avoids showing the hit and gracefully captures a brief glimpse of the plane’s shadow across the glass exterior of a Lower Manhattan building – an image used in almost all the trailers prior to the film’s release.

Because the bulk of World Trade Center ostensibly takes place in either the rubble of the collapsed buildings – where Port Authority Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and rookie Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) are pinned – or with the wives (Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal) awaiting word back home, the film is less a recreation of the day’s events (regardless of the scope implied by the title) and simply a story that – as Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote last week – was more about what would happen if a building collapsed than it is about terrorism. Considering the narrow scope, it is important to focus on the story World Trade Center does tell and not specifically, what it leaves out.

By that token, the film holds up surprisingly well, especially at conveying the sense of confusion and horror right through to the triumph and the courage at the conclusion, as seen from the eyes of the trapped survivors, their wives and family members, and the courageous rescue workers who risked their lives to help. Although the script is based on McLoughlin and Jimeno’s account of what happened (they are both given story credit), the script doesn’t give them much to do trapped in the rubble, leaving Stone to resort to the old banal stereotype: the flashback. For a day of such magnitude, the prosaic flashback sequences test the patience and drain momentum, not because they’re incompetently designed or badly acted, but simply because flashbacks in survival dramas are so commonplace, the idea is automatically predisposed to cliché.

Since the audience knows early on that, McLoughlin and Jimeno survive the attack, there is no great emotional investment placed on the audience regarding the characters’ outcome, making the events portrayed easier to stomach but, regrettably, somewhat irrelevant. The screenwriter (Andrea Berloff) and Stone settle for some life-affirming small talk and saccharine flashback sequences to tug at the heartstrings, but it never amounts to anything other than self-congratulatory pandering, and barring an inspired shot panning up from the rubble to show Manhattan Island from space, Oliver Stone plays it remarkably safe. However, the redeeming quality of World Trade Center, and ultimately the reason the film ascends higher than primetime melodrama, is the subtle and revelatory acting displayed by the four lead actors. Pinned under mounds of rock, dust, and debris, Cage and Peña rely on measured and subtle facial expressions – a twitch of the eye or a curl of the lip – to convey the horror and longing experienced by men who realised the severity of their situation, but not that they were at the epicentre of a terrorist attack. Jemeno’s haunting realization comes as he is lifted away on a stretcher while frantically scanning the surrounding chaos for signs of the towers that once stood watch over the area. By the end of the film, as the fates of all involved wraps up – a title card lists the Port Authority Officers who died – containing your emotions will be difficult, so bring a plenty of Kleenex.

Richard Saad
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006