World Trade Center Review

At some point in the future, a boxed set of 9/11 films will be made available. It will contain Steven Spielberg's two oblique responses to that epoch-making day; War Of The Worlds, capturing America's terror under inexplicable (alien) attack, and Munich, examining the correct moral response to terrorism. Also included would be Paul Greengrass's docudrama United 93, which respectfully followed the public record and avoided sensationalism. This reviewer would also include Donnie Darko in the boxed set, made before 9/11 but released in its wake, in which a plane crash ruptures time, much as the attacks themselves signalled a shift from one American age to another.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center promised to be the leader of that pack, and this reviewer came to the film anticipating the centrepiece of Hollywood's response to 9/11, a collection of films that have been as well-mannered yet circumspect as the eloquence of a courtier. However, about halfway through Stone's film, the realisation comes that this really has little to do with 9/11. As philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek has noted about World Trade Center, "One can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake."

This is the true story of two Port Authority policemen, Sergeant John McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), trapped in the concourse of the World Trade Center after the collapse of the twin towers. Neither man is aware that the buildings have collapsed. There is neither sight nor mention of terrorists. Cutting from our heroes down a hole to their worried families above ground, World Trade Center is a tentative mixture of tearjerker and disaster movie, cautious due to the requirement that it bear witness to the true-life heroism, staying within the tonal range that is sanctioned for American films depicting 9/11.