World Trade Center (Particle Man)

“Well, call me a transatlantic flight. He didn’t screw it up.” These were my first thoughts when exiting the theater after seeing World Trade Center. To me, the name Oliver Stone summons up images of war, murder, drugs, and the generally icky side of life. World Trade Center is a pretty screwball movie for him to do, considering. He usually does films about unsavory people doing unsavory things. I refer you to The Doors, Platoon, U Turn, and Natural Born Killers. So naturally, when I heard that he would be doing the first mondo-budget Hollywood movie about 9/11 (United 93 doesn’t count), my heart sank. Lord knows conspiracy theories about 9/11 abound, and Stone has been known to explore conspiracy theories in the past. I refer you to JFK and Nixon. He has let me down before. In fact, I’ve never really liked a movie of his that I saw. But you know, old Ollie didn’t do such a bad job on this one.

In all fairness, with the subject matter he was working with and the style he had chosen, he couldn’t have directed a great movie. He couldn’t have even directed just a good one. In fact, he only had two options: an adequate movie, or a horrendously terrible one. He must have known this, because he went with adequate. More than that, he avoided (mostly) all the things that would have made this a terrible movie. Terrible would have been easy. But instead, he ignores politics and conjectures about why this happened, and instead focuses on the human elements of the story. For the most part, it zeros in pretty tightly on the people involved in the tragedy, not the tragedy itself.

9/11 is a very touchy and sensitive subject for a lot of people. I had a very hard time getting anyone to see it with me, and ended up seeing it alone. There were a couple of moments when even I thought it would be a little too much for me. Everyone is saying it’s “too soon.” While I understand that, there really is no time that you could make this movie without it being “too soon.” This is a difficult movie for any American to watch, and if some just don’t want to, I can completely sympathize with their position.

As for specifics, the performances were good, better than they are in most movies today. There was no over-acting, and everyone was very convincing. Nicholas Cage, who’s really hit-or-miss, hits with this one as John McLoughlin, Port Authority Police Sergeant. He never oversells his character, and subtracts rather than adds to his performance, which is what this movie needs. Michael Peña plays the yin to Cage’s yang. With both of them, and all the police officers, you get the sense that they are just ordinary, unremarkable people. This is a definite plus, since all the heroes of 9/11 were just that: ordinary men and women doing what to them, in the moment, seemed like second nature. Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal behave just as women in their situation would have, and Bello’s performance in particular is very subtle at times.

Some things about the movie I really could have done without, like the Jesus sighting, which while probably a true account, was just cheesy. Cage saying near the end that his wife was what “kept him alive,” while also probably a true account, was very Hollywood and cliché. But for the most part, the movie was done very tastefully and with a heart. There were very few moments where we were forced to stop and think about the entirety of what just happened. The rest of the time, we were too busy being worried about the people involved. That was what the relatives and loved ones of the people involved were feeling at the time, so it fits. I appreciate that this film had to be made, and I did enjoy it. But I will probably never see it again.

Iconic lines:
“It’s as if God lowered a curtain of smoke, to shield us from what we are not ready to see.”
“I just saw Jesus and he was holding a bottle of water!”
“The kitchen isn’t even finished yet.”

22 Rating: 7

Particle Man