Posted: 08/09/2006

World Trade Center

(2006)

by Hank Yuloff

When I saw the ads, my thoughts were, “Is this too soon? Is the national psyche still shaky? How thick is the scab over that gaping wound that is 9/11?”

And as the opening credits rolled, I could feel the uneasy dread you get at the beginning of a horror film, knowing something bad is about to happen, but you paid for this entertainment and at the end, there will be an acceptable ending and some closure to the story. But this horror is the continuing national nightmare that really happened and even at the end of the 24-hour period of our country’s history portrayed in this film, the nightmare was just beginning.

As the title suggests, World Trade Center is about 9/11/01. This movie takes the point of view of several New York Port Authority police officers who become trapped and injured under the rubble of the World Trade Center and what happens to them as precious life saving time ticks off the clock.

Nicolas Cage stars as Sergeant John McLoughlin, a 21-year veteran of the department who wrote part of the evacuation plans for WTC after the 1993 attack. His comment on the way down to the site says it all “We had no plan for this.”

The film is directed by Oliver Stone and given some of his other “historical” projects (Nixon, JFK, Alexander) I was a bit wary of how the truth would be treated… or stretched… To fit his view of entertainment and story telling. What I found was that he took a look under that scab and decided to play it pretty straight up. I heard an audible groan when clips of President Bush saying we will come through this are on screen (since we now know what he had in mind). But shots of him are thankfully brief, as Stone stays focused on his micro story, instead of macro politics. There are some dramatic story lines that seem to combine many people into a few, but the run time is already a shade over 2 hours and how much revisiting that day can most audiences take?

I get a feeling that the actors had little challenge getting up for their roles and as an audience, we have no challenge relating to what they were going through. We are taken back and forth between the officers and their families as they all try to survive. Especially good are Maria Bello (Coyote Ugly, The Cooler, Thank You for Smoking) and Maggie Gyllenhall (Secretary, Criminal) as the wives of officers McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena, who brilliantly played the locksmith in Crash). Pena and Cage are both fantastic. Having just seen City of Angels on cable over the weekend, to see the transformation of Cage was shocking.

The effects are wrenching. Stone combines actual footage with CGI for the macro look, but assumes that we all know that the towers collapsed about an hour apart. When the officers are trapped after the first tower falls, we all know that the other one is going to and when it happens, all we are given is their view under the rubble. Stone does not go for the shock value of watching them fall—there is no need—we have seen it. Over. And over. And over. Instead, he takes us under it all, to hear it while our minds replay what we saw live on television.

As we (the people of the United States) begin to take a look at what happened on that day—taking a look at truth, fiction, and conspiracy theories to see the clearest pictures, movies like Flight 93 and WTC help us remember the basics: We were attacked, there were political ramifications that effect us all, but it comes down to individual Americans that suffer and rise above.

Hank Yuloff is a co-founder and film critic living in Encino, CA.

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