>>REVIEW
WORLD TRADE CENTER
STARRING Nicholas Cage, Michael Pena, and Michael Shannon
DIRECTED BY Oliver Stone
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How soon is too soon to make a movie about one of the defining tragedies of our generation? This is one of the prominent questions being aimed at Oliver Stone’s new film, World Trade Center. Just shy of the five-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, this film is one of the most highly anticipated of the year, for various reasons.
Many people feel as though it’s too soon to release such a film, and Stone at times seems to agree with them. Because of the short time frame between the actual disaster and its first motion picture, he treads cautiously. Neither of the planes hitting the towers are shown, nor is the buildings’ collapse. There is also very little gore – the most striking scene is a person seen from a distance jumping out of one of the burning buildings.
World Trade Center follows the story of two policemen, John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena). The two get stuck in an elevator shaft after the first building collapses and the majority of the film puts the audience in the rubble along with them. The story of heroism and rescue is saved for the film’s final quarter, in which the two are pulled out and taken to hospital. Their recovery is glossed over in the final minute. The two main characters are handled with respect and dignity, but the film’s hero – an individual surely meant to represent the human spirit – is Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon). Karnes is an ex-marine who hears the call of God, and marches to New York, straight into Ground Zero, despite protests from actual firefighters and policemen, and leads the search party that finds McLoughlin and Jimeno.
Despite being based on a true character, Karnes is written so cartoonishly by first-time screenwriter Angela Berloff that he simply cannot be taken seriously. He lives his entire life with an intense look of determination on his face, and speaks in clichés dripping with melodrama. Karnes even gets in one of the only references to war in the film when he says, "Somebody’s going to have to avenge this." You almost expect him to take flight and rip off his marine gear, revealing a large red "S" underneath.
The largest and most uncomfortable misstep in the film, though, is the connection Stone makes between heroism and Christianity. Karnes is portrayed as a devout Christian and Jesus appears in a vision to Jimeno, implying that help is on the way. In a catastrophe that was supposed to bring everyone together as equals, Stone unappealingly places religion at the film’s centre.
Telling this story so soon was a very difficult task for Stone and Berloff to take on, and they come close to pulling it off. Many of the film’s "characters" (they’re all based on real people) are written and performed with a deft combination of despair and hope – Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jimeno’s wife is particularly good. Unfortunately the police banter stumbles over itself with clichés and the choice by Stone not to depict the crashes makes the film less affecting than it should be. When this story needs to be told again, hopefully the passage of time will allow its director a little more space to operate. |
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