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| Rescue workers search for survivors |
Even though I was fascinated by the event that inspired it, for some reason I never saw the 2006 film World Trade Center. I guess I figured it was going to be an overly earnest, biased, or over-the-top portrayal of the horrible carnage we all saw that day. Because of the exhaustive and continuous news coverage, I couldn’t imagine there was much about the tragedy I didn’t already know. Still, curious about the film all these years later, I watched it recently on DVD, and was pleasantly surprised.
The planes crash relatively early in the film. All that’s shown is the shadow of a jet racing over Manhattan’s skyline. We’ve all seen enough unsettling newsreel footage that we understand what’s coming. Smart of director Oliver Stone to avoid showing all that again. It could've veered into exploitative, gratuitous territory.
Rather than trying to encompass all the overarching events of the disaster, Stone (Natural Born Killers, JFK, Wall Street, Platoon) chooses instead to focus on the stories of just a handful of locals who suffered as a result the tragedy.
The main protagonists are a group of Port Authority police officers, who arrive shortly after the airliners’ impact. The buildings are still standing, but on fire many floors up. Chaos reigns. Unsure how to even begin to comprehend the carnage they discover, they begin evacuating victims, and prepare to scale the towers. When the buildings ultimately fall, the group's in an underground shopping mall beneath them. Miraculously three of the men survive the collapse by diving into a stairwell. However, once the dust settles they’re trapped beneath the towers’ endless sea of rubble. Their families don’t know whether they’ve survived or not, only that the men were at the scene (and maybe inside) when the buildings came down. Like the rest of us at the time, the families are tortured by conflicting media reports, and sometimes contradictory and incomplete government press conferences.
A lesser storyline documents an ex-marine (Michael Shannon; Take Shelter, HBO's prohibition-crime drama Boardwalk Empire, Revolutionary Road) who, after seeing media coverage, decides to don his old uniform and head down to ground zero. He’s not sure how, but hopes he might be able to help.
The bulk of the film takes place in conversations between police chief McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage; H.I. in Raising Arizona, Matchstick Men, the Weather Man, Face/Off, the Rock) and Jimeno (Michael Pena; Academy-Award winning Crash, the crackling End of Watch, Oscar-nominated American Hustle, and the hysterical HBO comedy Eastbound and Down). They try to keep each other's spirits up, and stay alive while buried beneath tons of twisted metal and concrete. Badly injured and located several yards below the surface, it seems impossible they’ll ever be found.
WTC is undeniably emotionally powerful. Watching the two men suffer against immeasurable odds, is gripping. The lengths to which the rescue workers go to save them is life affirming. The families’ rollercoaster of alternating hope and despair is excruciating/agonizing. I was moved by several scenes, especially those with McLoughlin’s wife Donna (Maria Bello; the Cooler, A History of Violence, Auto Focus, Thank You for Smoking).
That said, most of the film is a fairly standard melodrama. Men trapped in life-threatening situations, and their families fear of the worst, is fare we’ve seen countless times before. The enormity of the 9/11 incident isn’t matched by the film’s scope. It’s somehow diminished by reducing it to the story of two men and their immediate families. Not that their suffering isn’t worth something, but this was an event that affected the entire globe.
The scenes of the towers’ crumbling are incredibly tense, realistic and accomplished filmmaking. They’re as violent, frightening and believable as anything in this year’s Academy Award-winning Gravity. It’s difficult to imagine what being there might have been like, but the film makers do an impressive job of re-creating the unimaginable. The images director Stone and his special- and visual-effects teams created are an impressive technical achievement.
Art director (Richard L. Johnson) and production designer (Jan Roelfs) merit mention. The live-action sets for “the pile” are terrifically expansive and realistic. The DVD extras, which describe how the sets (as well as the computer and visual effects) were created, are nearly as interesting as the movie itself.
WTC is certainly worth seeing. It’s not Stone's best work, but it is riveting, powerful stuff. His camera takes us inside the crevices beneath the towers’ shattered remains. To its credit, the film doesn’t trivialize 9/11 by using it solely as a vehicle for entertainment. It’s about the emotions left behind by the aftermath, more than terrorism. Likewise, it doesn’t traffic in politics, either. No mention is made of al Qaeda, President Bush, blowback, or failures of the intelligence community. It’s about a few individuals whose lives were directly affected by that dreadful day.
The planes crash relatively early in the film. All that’s shown is the shadow of a jet racing over Manhattan’s skyline. We’ve all seen enough unsettling newsreel footage that we understand what’s coming. Smart of director Oliver Stone to avoid showing all that again. It could've veered into exploitative, gratuitous territory.
Rather than trying to encompass all the overarching events of the disaster, Stone (Natural Born Killers, JFK, Wall Street, Platoon) chooses instead to focus on the stories of just a handful of locals who suffered as a result the tragedy.
The main protagonists are a group of Port Authority police officers, who arrive shortly after the airliners’ impact. The buildings are still standing, but on fire many floors up. Chaos reigns. Unsure how to even begin to comprehend the carnage they discover, they begin evacuating victims, and prepare to scale the towers. When the buildings ultimately fall, the group's in an underground shopping mall beneath them. Miraculously three of the men survive the collapse by diving into a stairwell. However, once the dust settles they’re trapped beneath the towers’ endless sea of rubble. Their families don’t know whether they’ve survived or not, only that the men were at the scene (and maybe inside) when the buildings came down. Like the rest of us at the time, the families are tortured by conflicting media reports, and sometimes contradictory and incomplete government press conferences.
A lesser storyline documents an ex-marine (Michael Shannon; Take Shelter, HBO's prohibition-crime drama Boardwalk Empire, Revolutionary Road) who, after seeing media coverage, decides to don his old uniform and head down to ground zero. He’s not sure how, but hopes he might be able to help.
The bulk of the film takes place in conversations between police chief McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage; H.I. in Raising Arizona, Matchstick Men, the Weather Man, Face/Off, the Rock) and Jimeno (Michael Pena; Academy-Award winning Crash, the crackling End of Watch, Oscar-nominated American Hustle, and the hysterical HBO comedy Eastbound and Down). They try to keep each other's spirits up, and stay alive while buried beneath tons of twisted metal and concrete. Badly injured and located several yards below the surface, it seems impossible they’ll ever be found.
WTC is undeniably emotionally powerful. Watching the two men suffer against immeasurable odds, is gripping. The lengths to which the rescue workers go to save them is life affirming. The families’ rollercoaster of alternating hope and despair is excruciating/agonizing. I was moved by several scenes, especially those with McLoughlin’s wife Donna (Maria Bello; the Cooler, A History of Violence, Auto Focus, Thank You for Smoking).
That said, most of the film is a fairly standard melodrama. Men trapped in life-threatening situations, and their families fear of the worst, is fare we’ve seen countless times before. The enormity of the 9/11 incident isn’t matched by the film’s scope. It’s somehow diminished by reducing it to the story of two men and their immediate families. Not that their suffering isn’t worth something, but this was an event that affected the entire globe.
The scenes of the towers’ crumbling are incredibly tense, realistic and accomplished filmmaking. They’re as violent, frightening and believable as anything in this year’s Academy Award-winning Gravity. It’s difficult to imagine what being there might have been like, but the film makers do an impressive job of re-creating the unimaginable. The images director Stone and his special- and visual-effects teams created are an impressive technical achievement.
Art director (Richard L. Johnson) and production designer (Jan Roelfs) merit mention. The live-action sets for “the pile” are terrifically expansive and realistic. The DVD extras, which describe how the sets (as well as the computer and visual effects) were created, are nearly as interesting as the movie itself.
WTC is certainly worth seeing. It’s not Stone's best work, but it is riveting, powerful stuff. His camera takes us inside the crevices beneath the towers’ shattered remains. To its credit, the film doesn’t trivialize 9/11 by using it solely as a vehicle for entertainment. It’s about the emotions left behind by the aftermath, more than terrorism. Likewise, it doesn’t traffic in politics, either. No mention is made of al Qaeda, President Bush, blowback, or failures of the intelligence community. It’s about a few individuals whose lives were directly affected by that dreadful day.
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