World Trade Center (2006)

Powerful

I'll tell you why so serious

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Although not reaching all way through, Oliver Stone and the actors deliver enough tension and drama to make the film worth its 129 minutes.The pros: The acting by Cage, Peña, Bello and Gyllenhaal. The feeling of authenticity in the scenes under the collapsed buildings. The storytelling power and potential of the events. The cons: The fact that despite the power of the story and fine performances, the movie never reaches the heights it could have.

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.

A somewhat "worthy" version of the September 11th attacks, told from the point of view of a group of policemen present in the foyer when the tower collapses on top of them. I didn't much like this film as much as I thought I would; in fact, it sent me to sleep, which really is a cardinal sin when the subject matter's as important as it is here. Oliver Stone was a great director back in the '80s, but his much-needed style is in short supply here, so that any old director could have done the job.One problem I had was with the casting of Nicolas Cage, who I just didn't think was sympathetic enough to hold the viewer's attention. Cage isn't my favourite actor and he does nothing to dispel that image here, while other, better characters like the one Jay Hernandez plays fall by the wayside and way too much time is taken up with unnecessary sub-plots about the 'families back home' – please! I could have done without this mawkish stuff that drags the storyline down.Another problem is that the film is very long winded. It starts off great, but halfway through the story's pretty much over and there's still another hour to go – it's as this point I fell asleep. It may have drastically improved after I did, but somehow I doubt it. For my money, the Paul Greengrass thriller UNITED 93 is everything that WORLD TRADE CENTER isn't: pacy, exciting, thrilling, urgent, and utterly, utterly heartbreaking and horrifying in equal measure.

I watched this for the first time nine years on from its year of production and nearly 14 on from the actual event. Happily, I turned to the IMDb reviews only after seeing the film, and find it surprising how much negativity there is around. The destruction of the World Trade Centre is obviously too big a story to tell in any single film, and it is also a story that should not be told in that way - in a non-documentary film - ever. But that does not mean that the event should not be dealt with at all, and here the focus is primarily on a rescue - one of the very few, and the rescuers - of which there were very, very many, including the rather incongruous bunch presented in this (true-story) film. The fact that the act of terror took most of its victims outright in a variety of more or less horrible ways does not mean that we "crow" or paint a ludicrously optimistic picture if we focus in one film on people who were actually rescued. Nor does it mean that we paint an unsubtle, gung-ho picture if we view recreations of the work of the hundreds (thousands?) who risked their lives (and very definitely their health, given the severe pollution on site) in the desperate hope that more might be extracted from the rubble. Indeed, to me this was not a particularly jingoistic presentation (and one would not particularly expect one from Oliver Stone). But it is moving and does inspire patriotism for humanity, as opposed to merely the United States. This is inevitable, natural and right, given that these are recreations of real events, and happily full of the weird, chancy, ad hoc, eclectic features that real-life events almost always present. Ultimately, then, a true story is told in a moving way (how could it be otherwise, given the circumstances?), and there is no reason I can see to dismiss this film (as so many have seemed to) as exploitative, over-emotional, over-patriotic or too inclined to focus on the few survivors, or anything else. This is a story worth telling, needing telling, and I did still feel enlightened further as regards the catastrophic and barbarous September 11 events. These cannot be bad things...