World Trade Center (2006) Reviews

• Good intentions and some powerful moments but overall a disappointment

  imaginarytruths2006-08-10

  I honestly didn't think it was very good at all, though I respect the intentions of the filmmakers. Whatever one wants to say about Oliver Stone, he showed a commitment to faithfully telling the story of these two Port Authority cops trapped in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and their worried wives. I liked a lot of the scenes in the beginning, the little mundane details like when Michael Pena's character is going about his everyday street beat. But the scenes at the WTC itself are really awkward, especially the cross-cutting between real footage and the actors. They just don't match, neither the film stocks nor the actors' reactions. A couple of moments with Pena standing there on the concourse were effective in creating a sense of horrific surrealism, and the moments right before the collapse were sudden and chilling...but overall it was not as powerful as I was expecting. For a film called World Trade Center, I guess I was expecting a little more context and not something focused so narrowly on these two Port Authority cops and an ex-Marine from Connecticut (as the only person outside these two cops' families whose story is told in the film, the focus on him reeks of jingoism in a GI Joe/Rambo vein). I know it's a little unfair to compare this to United 93, but I need to in order to illustrate the point. U93 told a specific story (the experience of the passengers on the plane) and placed it within a context (what was happening with air traffic control and the military). The lessons that are demonstrated in the actions of the passengers are enhanced by contrasting them with the helplessness of the "professionals" responsible for their safety. It's telling a dramatically powerful story, conveying a theme , AND providing a larger historical context of what happened that day. Oliver Stone, by comparison, has failed to effectively tie the experiences of these two trapped cops with the larger events of the day, and his film suffers as a result. And in the end the film largely shortchanges the stories of the 2749 families who didn't get good news that day. OK, so the film focuses on a narrow story of these two trapped cops and their families (and the gung ho marine, but he has limited screen time). Was their story well told? The scenes amidst the wreckage were compelling, but the back-and-forth with their wives became annoyingly schmaltzy. Yes, Maggie Gyllenhaal gave a strong performance as the pregnant wife and a lot of the moments with her family (esp the brief scene with the Colombian mother-in-law praying) were emotionally poignant, but so much of the family stuff was lame melodrama. And to be honest, even Maggie's performance was a little generic. I understand that these characters are all closely based on real life, but it still felt very Lifetime movie of the week. As for Maria Bello in the role of the other wife, I loved her in A History of Violence, but she was bland in this. The kid actors playing her children were mostly awful, and the film dragged whenever their story was on the screen. The resolution is mostly handled well, I really like what Oliver Stone is trying to convey about these small gestures of heroic goodness in the face of such desolation. But the power of these scenes is undermined by his tendency to pour on the sappiness while largely ignoring the greater horror of the day. It feels like a soap opera set against the greatest tragedy of our age, and that just doesn't work for me. In short...not intense enough, not enough context, too much melodrama, not enough of a sense of reverence for what happened, highly impressive job of recreating the debris field, a charismatic performance from Maggie, overall a mediocre film.

• Amazingly uninspired

  ShowMeTheCredits2007-11-05

  With a tragedy as large as this, and a bucket-of-possible-plots as filled as this, it's quite disturbing to see Oliver Stone hit his low-point of his entire career on this exact project. With a mere fifth of the runtime away, we have our heroes in distress, with little to no character buildup been done to carry us through the last four-fifths of cinematic pain with any kind of relation to the characters put on the screen. It's as if the story is so well-known that the script writer sees no point in drawing out the basics, which is perfectly understandable as you'd have to be literally dead to not know a heck of a lot about 9/11, and that counts for Americans and Eskimos alike. What is disturbing is that it sees no point in drawing out a story for us in which we get to know the characters on screen, either. The entire runtime seems to be wasted on emotional porn of such low quality that you start to wish for the people on screen to die soon so that the end credits will come and rescue you. You don't know who they are, what they're like, who they know, not even what their names are, and yet you've been staring at them for hours. The only thing letting you know that they're "the good guys" is the ever-present string ensemble playing fiddle for them all along. This movie presents no story, no character buildup, no suspense, no action sequences (expecting to see the towers fall in state-of-the-art CGI wonder? Forget it, what you get are the shadow of a plane on the ground, and the sound of tower 2 falling, plus some rubble, that's it), no nothing, really. This movie is so superficial it's impossible to say what it really wants to say, if anything. The problem is, it says nothing, and it takes more than two hours of it to accomplish that.

• Like watching paint dry

  ronnay_barkay2007-02-03

  Im just after pulling myself away from the TV and that awful movie, World Trade Center, to write this review. Now. This is like watching a snuff movie. It depicts the events that happened on September 11th,2001 and we all remember so vividly because it was only a few years ago. Most of the time you're watching Nicholas Cage screaming in pain. and when you're not watching that you're watching another guy scream in pain. Shall I go on? It's badly edited, although well made, but who cares. It's not entertaining or thought-provoking or funny. It doesn't spark any debate. World Trade Center is just a very bland, uninspiring piece of film making.

• A classless play on emotions

  hugodinwitty2006-08-12

  I know that many people who don't like this movie say so just because they thought it was made at an inappropriate time. Personally, I hated this movie on its own merit as poor film-making. It seems that Oliver Stone just decided he wanted to make a movie, any movie, about 9/11, and didn't care about the content of the movie. The end result was a movie of such pitiful quality that one could go though the script and replace the term "police officer" with "miner" and "World Trade Center" with "a coal mine" and the entire script would work perfectly as a cave-in disaster movie. It's that generic. Stone tries to carry the movie just by showing how sad the families were and how scared the policemen were, meanwhile allowing the audience no interesting plot points to hold on to, nor any significance to the tragedy. In the end, I have to conclude that Oliver Stone just wanted to get some cheap emotional reactions from the crowd, because at one point the movie says that it is about the potential for good in humanity and how strong we can be in the face of adversity. Stone quickly forgets this, because only about 15% of the movie even shows people coming together to help one another. The other 85% of the movie is spent watching the families argue or seeing flashbacks to their happy memories, which is a good way to get audience reaction but hardly lends any significance or depth to the plot. I don't in any way want to belittle the pain that these families had to endure, which is why I am disappointed that that pain was exploited to make a bad movie. September 11 was the most important and tragic event in my lifetime, and I think it deserves more respect than to be made into a generic, poorly-written disaster movie less than five years after it happened.

• National tragedy as formula storytelling

  anhedonia2006-09-02

  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.