World Trade Center (Dr. Worm)

I think you should see this movie.

I don't know you personally, so I don't know your story and why you haven't seen it yet, or why you don't want to see it. Maybe you have already seen it; if that's the case, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the person behind you. The person who's saying it's too soon, saying they don't want to relive that day, saying that it's wrong to make a movie about such a dark point in our history.

Those are all fair reasons not to see a movie. But let me just tell you, they don't apply here.

Now, I can't make you see World Trade Center, and I don't want to make you see it. But I also don't want you to miss it for a reason that may be irrelevant.

If you're reluctant to see this movie, it probably isn't so much because you think it's going to be poorly shot, or because the acting is going to be bad. Neither is the case, I assure you. But I don't want to talk about that right now.

I want to talk about what this movie isn't. And what it's not--what I suspect many of you fear--is a shameless ploy to make money off of a national tragedy. It's not that. It's not even really a disaster movie. There's nothing Bruckheimerian about this film at all, no high-tech explosions, no shameless pandering to an audience's fears and emotions. In fact, the movie is notable for its certain lack of pandering. It has a certain healthy disregard for what its audience might be feeling, which leads to the inclusion of one particularly strange scene and one rather weird character that certainly are not what you've come to expect from Hollywood.

No, this movie just wants to tell a story.

And it does so to a perfectly acceptable degree. It's a simple story of two men trapped and hurting, their families wracked with worry, and the race to save them. The 9/11 background provides a context for all of us to relate to the events, but it's really much more irrelevant to the story than you might think. The acting serves the story. None of it is mind-bendingly awesome (with the notable exception of Nicholas Cage before the tower collapse), but none of it is embarrassing either. Like the lighting, the cinematography, the screenwriting, the sound mixing, and everything else, it's just another helping hand to tell the story.

But even the story by itself wouldn't have made this such a recommendable film. No, what makes this such a recommendable film to me is the take on the story that we get, summarized beautifully by a certain image and a certain speech in the movie.

The image comes toward the very end of the movie, as Nicholas Cage's character is being pulled from the rubble, strapped to a backboard. The camera pans out and shows us a literal sea of volunteers, all huddled together just to hold the backboard for a second before passing it on to the next person in the chain.

And this image is reinforced by a voiceover speech made by Nicholas Cage's character at the end of the film. "9/11 showed us what humans are capable of," he begins telling us, "the bad, sure. But also the good."

I reflected on that speech, on that image, on the fact that 19 human beings worked to bring the Twin Towers down, but that millions worked to aid, comfort, help, and serve those affected that day. And I got goosebumps. And--supposedly impossible for a film about a day of unspeakable evil--I also got an enormous feeling of good toward my fellow man.

And that's why you should go see this movie. That's why this movie gets a 16.