World Trade Center: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

9/09/2007 Posted by Admin

The past as present

(Originally published 2006)

When word first came that Oliver Stone was making a movie about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, it seemed as if the production already was doomed. Questions about the movie--and arguments against it--rose up even before a script or a cast was in place.

What would Stone, the least subtle of directors, do with material that demanded a nuanced hand? Would he play the movie straight (unlikely), or would he go for one of his conspiracy theories, which have put off so many? If he did go with the latter, what shape would such a conspiracy take? And how political would his movie be?

Negative buzz surrounding the movie heightened when it was announced that Nicolas Cage had been cast in the lead as Sgt. John McLoughlin, the Port Authority officer who was in Tower One with his team of volunteers when the building collapsed. The initial implication was that by going with an action star, Hollywood was going all the way with this movie. They wanted it to be the blockbuster that its predecessor, "United 93," with its cast of unknowns, had no overt intention of being.

While Cage can be terrific in his smaller, offbeat roles, this almost never is true for the over-blown popcorn powerhouses that make up a good deal of his career. In so many of those movies, from "The Rock," "Face/Off" and "Gone in Sixty Seconds" to "Captain Corelli's Mandolin," "Windtalkers" and "National Treasure," he almost always is either overbearing and ridiculous or maudlin and ridiculous, which is precisely the sort of baggage "World Trade Center" didn't need.

Now that it's here, with a script by Andrea Berloff, it's especially nice to report that Stone and company worked hard to get it right. "World Trade Center" is an often powerful, riveting movie that resists the sensationalism that would have cheapened it. It possesses such unexpectedly deep reservoirs of reserve--Stone literally keeps us at Ground Zero in the film, going so far as to never show the planes crashing into the buildings--that it eschews everything that so many of its early critics expected of it.

The film co-stars Michael Pena as Will Jimeno, the young officer who was with McLoughlin when the first tower came down and they were pinned beneath the unimaginable piles of ash, rebar and rubble. The movie is about their fight for survival, a good deal of which was achieved through conversation. With their internal injuries so great, these two essentially kept each other alive by talking to each other. Had either fallen asleep, it could have been fatal.

Stone also focuses on each man's family, with Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal adding a controlled sense of intensity to the film as Donna McLoughlin and the pregnant Allison Jimeno, respectively. Michael Shannon is David Karnes, the former Marine who comes to the site as if by some religious calling. It is he who is instrumental in finding the men, who were among only 20 people to be pulled alive from the wreckage.

About the wreckage--perhaps Stone's greatest triumph is in his and production designer Jan Roelfs' seamless recreation of Ground Zero. For his film to truly succeed, it wasn't only critical for it to be emotionally authentic, but also physically authentic. Anything that didn't match our memories of those now iconic images of the fallen towers would have fouled the production. And so, Stone rises to the occasion, achieving greatness by creating the illusion of reality within the most surreal of environments.

In the end, "World Trade Center" allows itself only a fleeting global comment on the past and, by extension, the present, with Stone briefly capturing world reaction to the news of the attack via real-life news footage. What he evokes in the collective grief of the faces he shows is that five years ago, there was a window in which much of the world undeniably became one. Though he doesn't comment on the blinds that gradually have been drawn over that window, the power of his movie and the reality of our current situation is that the director doesn't have to.

Grade: A

Technorati tags: