World Trade Center Reviews

Agent provocateur Oliver Stone's microcosmic, deeply respectful, resolutely nonpartisan human-interest story, from a screenplay by Andrea Berloff, is light-years away from the BATTLE OF ALGIERS-style political thriller he publicly envisioned making about 9/11 during the nerves-afire aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In fact, this fact-based story of "courage and survival" may be the least provocative and most conventional film of a notoriously contentious career, a film whose formulaic roots will be immediately apparent to anyone who's ever seen a claustrophobic film about miners trapped in a cave-in, mountain climbers buried by an avalanche or sailors sweating bullets aboard a downed submarine. September 11, 2001: Veteran Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) rises in the dark to prepare for his 90-minute commute from Goshen, New York, to the 42nd Street bus terminal that houses the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police force. Younger officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) makes his shorter trip from Clifton, New Jersey; other members of the precinct trickle in by train and subway, joke in the locker room, suit up and get their assignments at roll call. They start their beats, looking for runaways, discouraging vagrants, observing dealers working the terminal's corners, giving directions to tourists... and then, at quarter to nine, everything changes. Stone is in peak form re-creating the hour between the moment the first plane crashed and the fall of 2 World Trade Center: the confusion and disbelief at the news reports, the scramble of emergency responders, the shower of paper blanketing the plaza and the layer of ash spewing down from the burning floors, the dazed evacuees drifting through the streets, bloodshot eyes staring out from gray skin, the creaking death rattle of Tower 2 as it begins to give way and as McLoughlin orders his four-man volunteer team — Jimeno, plus officers Dominick Pezullo (Jay Hernandez), Christopher Amoroso (John Bernthal) and Antonio Rodrigues (Armando Riesco) — to run. And then the darkness: Amoroso and Rodrigues are gone, an aftershock kills Pezullo and McLoughlin and Jimeno are alone in the wreckage, wounded and pinned at least two stories below street level without water or working radios. Stone divides the rest of the film among the trapped men, their increasingly desperate wives (Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal) and the deeply eccentric Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a devoutly Christian former Marine who calmly left his job as a Connecticut accountant, got a short-back-and-sides haircut, put on his old uniform and drove to New York, where he boldly walked past police barricades onto the groaning, smoldering pile and started looking for survivors. Beautifully acted and thoroughly myopic, the film manages to strip 9/11 of its context and scope, boiling it down to an intimate story of decent, ordinary people dealt a staggeringly bad hand and dealing with it, each according to his or her nature. Stinging details shine through with piercing clarity: Jimeno asking, "What happened to the buildings?" as his rescuers finally lift him from the hole, his wife marveling that he's "breathing out rocks" as she glimpses ER staffers suctioning gravel and ash from his mouth. But Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest — who could have imagined?