World Trade Center

I was afraid this movie would be over Hollywoodized like Pearl Harbor was. However, the movie was made in good taste and was very emotional. It was the first time i had ever teared up at a movie. It captured that period very well and it brought back a lot of memories of that day for me and the days that had followed. The acting was pretty good, especially Michael Pena, who seemed to actually be living the experience instead of acting it out in a movie. When the movie ended the audience was silent(pre screening)and didn't clap, not because they didn't like it but out of respect. I felt really in-touch with the characters and while i teared up in some parts I also smiled and even laughed at some parts as the characters tried to cheer each other up. Expect it to win some awards.

Many good critical points have already been made about this film, but I'll just add that some historical events are better portrayed through documentaries and viewing real time news footage other than a Hollywood script.

This movie is an example of that.

Something surprising happened while watching Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" - I realized how much more I appreciated Paul Greengrass' "United 93." Greengrass' film was lean, stripped of any backstory for any of the characters. Very simply, it told what happened that horrible day on the plane - though he used some license - and didn't wallow in needless sentimentality.

Stone, on the other hand and rather surprisingly, seems to have gone out of his way to make something that would be so palatable and inoffensive that it would turn out rather bland, above anything else.

The 45 minutes of "World Trade Center" are terrific. After offering us quick glimpses into the lives of Port Authority cops John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), Andrea Berloff's script gets us right into the attacks on the Twin Towers.

The crumbling of the towers, which still is incredibly difficult to watch, let alone fathom, is handled with taste, but also is awfully gripping. We get a real sense of the terror and panic and then Stone gets the claustrophobic atmosphere right. With close-ups of Pena and Cage amidst the ruins, he gets us so close, we can almost taste the rubble and concrete dust.

But that's the last time we really see or feel any sense of genuine, gripping storytelling in this film. I realize criticizing a film about 9/11, especially one that displays its American stars and stripes so blatantly, is tantamount to treason these days. After all, as this administration and its minions love to point out, if you disagree with them, you're not only unpatriotic, but also an appeaser of the villains. It's poppycock, of course. Dissent is undoubtedly American, but these chaps so love draping themselves in the flag that jingoism overwhelms all reason. Why bother with rational thought when you can scare people?

What struck me while watching the film is realizing how much goodwill was channeled toward the United States after the attacks and what's ultimately sad is how this president took all that goodwill and squandered it by launching an utterly pointless war in Iraq. We could have done so much good in the world, instead of now being one of the most hated nations in the world. And Bush has now turned 9/11 into a political slogan for political (and personal) gain.

The problem with Stone's film isn't so much the story, but how Berloff chose to tell it. According to Berloff, cops, rescue workers, even family members tend to enjoy speaking in exposition. There are moments that surely someone of Stone's calibre should have realized needed to be rewritten because the dialogue seems mediocre at best.

Where the film suffers is when the story cuts between the two trapped men and their families, especially their wives. Maria Bello as Donna McLoughlin and the always wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jimeno never get much to do with their sorely underwritten roles. It's a true testament to Gyllenhaal's talent that she turns a rather sour role into a passionate, moving performance. Poor Bello, on the other hand, isn't that fortunate. She's relegated to spending more time than she should weeping.

The trouble with these scenes is not that Berloff tries to wring some emotion out of them, but that they come off as unabashedly sentimental. And the emotions are entirely unearned.

Pena proves, just as he did in "Crash" (2005), that he's able to be something special on screen. His character is far more engaging than Cage's; Pena's emotions come off without any artifice.

I can't help but feel that "World Trade Center" could have been the gut-wrenching experience Stone intended it to be had he and Berloff approached the story much in the way Greengrass did "United 93." Stone's movie is far from lean. It's padded with needless sentimentality and moments that just try so hard to earn some emotion, any emotion, that they come off as utterly false. And that's unfair to the people whose story is being chronicled here.

Watching Cage and Pena trapped should be gripping stuff. But even their dialogue is reduced to exposition. And when Berloff finally leaves the two men and their families, we get Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a man so moved by what he saw that he came down to the Twin Towers and proved to be McLoughlin and Jimeno's miracle. We all know Karnes is a real person, but I very much doubt that he speaks in bumper stickers. But that's exactly what Berloff has him do.

The first 45 minutes of the movie showed what Stone truly is capable of doing. The rest is rather tepid. And unbelievably forced. Who knew that Oliver Stone, of all people, would resort to formulaic storytelling. Perhaps he's been so stung by conspiracy accusations and was so keen on appeasing his critics and forgetting the execrable "Alexander" (2004) that he opted to make the kind of movie Ron Howard would make. That's not a compliment.

Stone cold, that's what I call the new Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center. Taking the story of two Port Authority Police who survived, Stone manages to make the singular event of the last decade a boring made-for-TV story of two cops buried and waiting rescue, by the Marines no less. There are marks of an auteur to be sure such as the set design, just as authentic looking as when I visited ground zero after the attack. But the mark of the real Stone, one that carries the heft of his personal opinion about an event (Platoon) or his off-center look at history (JFK), is absent.

Let's face it: Two cops, John McLoughlin (Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), buried beneath rubble with small talk to keep themselves alive is neither great drama nor riveting suspense when you know ahead of time they are 2 of the 20 to be saved and their dialog doesn't come close to the bite of WWII film foxhole repartee. Cutting as often as he can to the dull families in New Jersey waiting for word about their lost loved ones, Stone still fails to make even this horrific event interesting.

As a matter of fact, he fails to put the event into its larger context of a world crisis that changes the way we live forever. It's a challenge to do so if you choose only a small part of the event, but a great director should be able to as Stone did, for instance, with Wall Street, where the shenanigans of one broker clearly represented a corrupt generation of self-centered consumers.

It's as if Oliver Stone promised Hollywood after his disastrous Alexander (which I liked) that he'd be a good boy and not editorialize about 9/11. Heck, point of view is Stone: Remember the conspiracy theory of JFK? Google "Loose Change" to get an introduction to 9/11 conspiracy theory and wonder why Oliver Stone couldn't have gone there rather than the straight way. Or at least part of the way.

"While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take. If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake!" Shakespeare, the Tempest

I saw an advanced screening of World Trade Center last night, and I was very impressed. I went into it unbiased, deciding that I would indeed like to hear the story of what happened to the two officers this movie is about, and I would take it for what it is, regardless of whether or not people think it's still too soon.

This is a very moving and intense look at the story of the officers' ordeal as well as what their families had to go through. Of course, the viewer is reminded of a lot that happened on that day, and it is disturbing, sad, and angering just as the real events were. However, the movie makes no attempt at all to explain what happened or give some great message to the world about terrorism, government, or war. It's more of a character study and simply a look at a terrible event from several perspectives.

The acting is superb, and I have more respect for Nicholas Cage after this movie than I did going into it. There are some very intense moments, and moments that, as I've said, are angering and disturbing, but not to make the viewer want to walk away, but simply to be angry that these events had to occur in the first place.

Thankfully, there are several moments of humor throughout the movie, to give the viewer a break perhaps, but they work well.

I gave this movie a 7 out of 10 because the writing at times was not all that it could have been, especially some of the dialogue. Overall, the acting is great and the characters feel real, but in some scenes you may feel like the sentimentality is being forced and doesn't feel genuine.

I will recommend this movie to people who are not dead set against it, or someone who is just looking for exactly what it is: a movie made for entertainment and as a tribute to those that died.