The main complaint being made against Oliver Stone’s new film, World Trade Center, is that it is not an Oliver Stone film. Where, ask his fans, are the politics, the conspiracy theories and revelations? What has happened to Oliver Stone the iconoclast and irritant?

To which Stone, in numerous press interviews, has essentially been saying: “Sorry, folks, but I wanted to make a film that was a tribute to the bravery and goodness that Americans showed on that day in September when the Twin Towers came tumbling down.”

With World Trade Center, the pugilistic and polemical Stone has delivered the American people a 130-minute pat on the back. And European liberals and leftists are deeply annoyed that it wasn’t a punch in the face.

Stone has taken 9/11 and stripped it clean of everything that makes that day so important and interesting — politics, symbolism, history. What’s left is the standard scenario of your average disaster movie. Two Port Authority Police officers go to save lives and end up trapped in the rubble of one of the collapsed towers. It could be any building, or any moment in history, and you would have the same story.

Background

• World Trade Center

• World Trade Center - Sunday Times review

• Ground Zero, the film set

• Relatives back Stone's 9/11 plot

• Coming soon: 9/11, The Movie

Background

• United 93

Oliver Stone on World Trade Center

What was it like to be carried alive from the ruins on September 11?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

These two cops are Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña). We sit with them as they lie in the rubble talking. Not much happens during their 20-hour ordeal. The drama is static. We hear their stories and see that these are good, ordinary men — decent dads, good husbands and honourable cops. It makes for a fine life, but poor drama. Where are the humour, the anger, the dark thoughts that come when death whispers in your ear?

The build-up to their entrapment is actually rather good. Instead of the two planes crashing, Stone gives us a haunting shot of the shadow of the first plane as it descends into its target. And he re-creates the eerie horror of seeing the smoke spewing from the building; a monsoon of paper falling on New York like a ticker-tape parade in hell.

But the structural flaw in Andrea Berloff’s screenplay is to have our two heroes trapped in the rubble. Where is the heroism in that? They are survivors, but not heroes. That honour really belongs to the rescue workers who, at great peril to themselves, come and get McLoughlin and Jimeno out — and they appear only towards the end of the film.

What’s wrong with World Trade Center is not that it sets out to celebrate courage and heroism, but that it does it so badly. It has no vigour or energy. Stone’s film needs more testosterone and fewer tears.

We get a mild taste of true-grit heroism in the figure of Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), an accountant and former marine who, seeing the events on television, declares that God wants him to go and save lives. So he puts on his fatigues, marches into the wreckage and finds the two cops. But his appeal is undermined by the fact that he looks like one of those weirdos you find in the photographs of Diane Arbus.

Karnes clearly has balls, and that raises the question: what happened to Oliver Stone’s creative gonads? There’s something timid about this film, as if Stone is so anxious not to upset any of the men involved, or their families, that he won’t ask tough questions or show anything that might set off the landmines of memory. He has done his duty to them at the cost of betraying his audience — and worse, himself. One moment sums up this timidity perfectly. We are with the two cops when the camera takes off and we get a long tracking shot that goes up into the sky and promises to give us an aerial view of Ground Zero in all its true horror — then Stone cuts the shot before we can really see it.

When we’re not down in the rubble with the two cops, Stone dumps us among their anguished wives (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello) and children as they wait for news of their loved ones. We’re invited to feel their pain, share their anguish, enjoy the grief feast. It feels intrusive.

What’s really disappointing about this film is that it has absolutely nothing to say about that day or what has happened since. The only message Stone manages to come up with is completely obvious: bad things can bring out good things in people.


World Trade Center
12A, 129 mins
2 stars

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