Starring: Nicolas Cage, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello
Director: Oliver Stone
Rated: M
WORLD Trade Centre is a solid piece of drama, geared completely for its American audience with the memories and griefs of September 11, 2001.
It is a tribute to the police and the firefighters who went to the centre and into the towers to rescue people, and those who lost their lives – hundreds of them.
That, perhaps, is the difficulty for audiences around the world.
It is patriotic in the best sense.
But, it also has its moments of jingoism, which tend to put non-Americans on alert or even to make them hostile. It is best to note this early in the review and then go on to praise what is good.
Personally, the most difficulty I had was with the character of the marine who comes to help in the rescue on the afternoon of September 11. He is played by Michael Shannon.
His severe face and the intense glint in his eyes are truly alarming.
When he hears the news, his stone-faced determination takes him to his pastor for advice as to how he should help. It is a religious mission in the crusading sense.
Donning his uniform, he travels to New York and is able to enter the site and does fine work in the rescue.
A postscript notes that he later fought in Iraq. One could not imagine him doing otherwise. That is the scary part of the screenplay.
However, the re-creation of the planes hitting the towers, their collapse and the killing and trapping of police officers is also truly frightening.
The collapse has been re-created in great detail.
The audience is there and probably wondering how we would have managed in such a situation – trapped, injured and in pain, dehydrated, alone, not knowing what had happened or what was happening, striving to ward off sleep and unconsciousness.
These aspects of the film are excellently done.
Many of us have our memories of September 11, 2001, where we were when we heard and saw the news.
It started as a perfectly ordinary day. And that is how the film starts, a well paced crescendo of police and workers with their early rising, leaving families, travelling into New York City, the increasing numbers of drivers, train commuters, people chatting, reading, getting the paper, something to eat.
At the port authority precinct, police get their roster for the day.
Then come the shudders, the shock, the reports – and the police go into action.
This film focuses on a small group and then on two of the survivors who spent so many hours trapped beneath the rubble.
They are played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena. Their scenes together, trying to support and encourage each other, are very effective.
In a popular film like this, it is necessary to fill in the characters’ backgrounds, show us some flashbacks of their lives, their families, as well as the anguish of uncertainty and waiting that they endure.
While this is necessary and director and cast do their best, these sections look rather more routine, perhaps too familiar to audiences from too many disaster movies.
The two wives are played well by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
We had to see these family reactions and, while they give some kind of audience relief for the tension, they also tend to take away from the scenes with the trapped men.
This is Oliver Stone’s most objective film. No conspiracies like JFK, no histrionics like Nixon, no sensationalism like Natural Born Killers.
Rather, this is a tribute film, an acknowledgment of heroism and humanity that most audiences can appreciate.
