HERE is my review from the middle of last month. I'll reprint it again for the sake of this thread...
World Trade Center (2006 - Oliver Stone)
Just short of five years after that horrible day, Oliver Stone brings us a drama about two of the men who responded to the call because it was their job to do so. Nicholas Cage is John McLoughlin and Michael Peņa (
Crash) is Will Jimeno, two Port Authority Police Officers on duty that September morning. Their post was the bus terminal in midtown, but when the first tower was hit they were part of the city-wide response. Sergeant McLoughlin was an over twenty-year veteran who had spent a dozen years posted at The Trade Center and helped design the escape plans after the 1993 car bombing. But even he knows there is no evacuation plan for this level of attack. Jimeno was still fairly new to the force and learning the ropes, but anxious to do anything he could to help. On the way downtown, a couple of the officers got information via cellphones that the second tower had been hit, but at this point it hadn't filtered down the channels of command. As McLoughlin and his men arrived at the devastation to lend a hand, they still didn't realize the full magnitude of what they were facing.
The first forty minutes of Stone's film retell the events of that chaotic morning. As characters we don't know much about them yet, other than McLoughlin is a husband and father who routinely left his family sleeping early in the morning as he did most mornings. He, Jimeno and two other Port Authority officers were in the main concourse between the twin towers about to ascend and look for people in trouble when the first building collapsed. With only seconds to react, McLoughlin yelled for them to run for the elevator shafts, which he knew were the strongest part of the buildings. After the 110 floors fell on top of them, McLoughlin and Jimeno were pinned under concrete. Another officer, Dominick Pezzulo, was able to free himself and started trying to free his fellows when the second building collapsed. Pezzulo did not survive this time, leaving John and Will pinned and in pain in the center of unbelievable carnage.
The rest of the movie tells the story of these two men trying to keep each other alive in the most desperate of situations while their families await word and the rescue effort begins. Maria Bello (
The Cooler, A History of Violence) is McLoughlin's wife, Donna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (
Secretary, Happy Endings) is Jimeno's wife, Allison. Donna has four children to look after during the uncertainty of whether or not her husband will return home, Allison has one small girl and is pregnant with another. Their helplessness and uncertainty is almost unbearable as it was for so many families after that morning.
Frankly, Oliver Stone is not a filmmaker I like or even respect most days. After his initial triumphs in the 1980s as a writer/director with
Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street and
Born on the Fourth of July, for me his output becomes more self-consciously about style and as narratives less and less satisfactory with too many agendas thrust awkwardly about without artfully integrating them into the fabric of the stories. Happily I must say this is his most restrained filmmaking in years. With the exception of a few flashbacks and a minor dream sequence of the two trapped men, this is straight-forward storytelling without any experimental style or intellectual distractions. A true story with this much power doesn't need anything splashy to aid it, and thankfully Stone respects that.
Cage and Peņa are both good as the two men, and they are able to convey a lot considering they spend two thirds of the movie in one position in near darkness. The horror of knowing they probably won't get out plus dealing with their pain as well as the fires and settling of the debris that continued during their ordeal all while trying to somehow keep the other's spirits raised enough that they don't give up completely is powerful stuff. The scenes with the families are more standard fare, but Bello and Gyllenhaal do well expressing grief, rage and the insanity of not simply knowing one way or the other. Also in the cast are Stephen Dorff (
Blade, Cecil B. DeMented) as one of the officers working his way through the rubble, Frank Whaley (
Swimming with Sharks, The Freshman) as a paramedic and Michael Shannon (
The Woodsman, Bug) as a former Marine who finds himself drawn to Ground Zero to help.
The score by Craig Armstrong (
The Quiet American) is mostly a quiet piano, and while there's more of it than I would have liked on a personal level (I think the movie probably could have been made virtually sans score), it isn't as obtrusive as I feared going in. The recreation of September 11th at the foot of the twin towers and the Ground Zero aftermath is amazing, and like the D-Day sequence of Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan is technically perfect. Despite the fact that we've all seen those horrible images thousands of times, especially during those first few days, the power of Stone's recreation is amazing. To me these scenes didn't seem exploitative at all, but a stark and stunning look at the tragedy from the viewpoint of these two men especially. As most of you probably know, McLoughlin and Jimeno were the last two of only twenty people rescued from the wreckage, and the movie is based on their accounts. That authenticity is felt throughout.
Much like recent historical docudramas
Apollo 13 or
All the President's Men, as a movie
World Trade Center works even though we know the ending and most of the details before it even starts. Knowing they survive their ordeal makes their predicament no less intense. In the end Stone's film is a good dramatization of the will to survive and a glimpse at some of the heroism and pain that resulted from that attack. I've got issues with a few things here and there, but overall it is respectful and powerful.
GRADE: B+
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