What’s this all about?
World Trade Center, released in 2006 by noted crackpot and sometimes filmmaker Oliver Stone, tells a story of two NYC Port Authority cops who get trapped in the rubble of the collapsing World Trade Center building 2 about 10 minutes after arriving on scene to the September 11 attacks.
I was 24 in September of 2001, and I remember the times well. I also remember seeing the advertisements for this film when it was released, and thinking, “Nope. There’s no way that isn’t tasteless, jingoistic crap.”
I was at least two thirds right.
Who is Nick in this one?
Nick plays NY Port Authority Sergeant “John MacLoughlin.” He’s a capable, respected leader, if a bit dull. At one point in the film he comments that he never made Lieutenant because he doesn’t smile enough. Nick actually plays this part of the role well.
He has a wife, and some absurd number of kids, which we learn about throughout the film. He leads a team of four other men into the concourse between the two towers of the World Trade Center shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. While scrounging equipment to prepare to climb the tower, the team is caught in the debris of Tower Two’s collapse. Nick and another cop are trapped in the rubble but survive.
The majority of the film deals with their motionless wait for rescue, which I found to be a perplexing choice, given the vast array of stories about that day that must have been available. This whole affair is based on real life events, and as far as I can tell, stays mostly close to the actual events.
Who else is in this one?
Michael Peña (“Luis” from Ant Man) plays “Jimeno,” a rookie cop who also has a wife and a probably absurd number of kids. He’s the other cop trapped with Nick. He plays this role exactly the way Michael Peña plays every role he’s ever had. It’s fine, I guess.
Mario Bello (The Mr. and Mrs. Smith TV Series, if you can believe that exists) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary) play the cops wives. They’re never in a scene together except at the very end, buy they’re basically interchangeable. They’re New York/New Jersey housewives who cry and flip out and yell at people on the phone and demand answers and have a thousand unnamed family members. Gyllenhaal is pregnant, so she also vomits a lot.
Both characters are one-dimensional, and so are the performances. Also, Mario Bello has some freaky thing going on with her eyes where they always appear to be either almost completely black, or an unnaturally bright shade of blue. I don’t know if she always looks like that because I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in literally anything else. Maybe she’s on the “spice.” It really feels like her role was written for Gail O’Grady, but O’Grady probably said, “nah, it’s way too soon for this.”
Jon Bernthal (The Punisher) plays another cop who gets killed off screen with even less screen time than the others.
Michael Shannon (Bullet Train) plays “Dave Karnes,” a real-life accountant, who on September 11th just decided to put his old USMC uniform on and go look for survivors while pretending to still be a Marine. He, and another (maybe real?) Marine go digging in the rubble after being specifically told not to by the people in charge, and find our heroes. Then, Dave rejoins the Marines and goes off to serve two more tours as an improbably old Marine in Iraq to get “vengeance.” He comes across as a complete sociopath, and I expected him to start murdering school children or eating kittens at any minute.
Did you see that?
At one point in the film, the family of one of the trapped cops (it doesn’t matter which one) is walking through a hospital where they see a wall of homemade missing posters meant to represent people lost in the attack. I remember these displays, and they were massive and moving. I can understand why the filmmakers would include this.
For some reason, though, this display prominently features a missing poster for a cat named “Snowflake.” I’m a pet lover, and I’m certain that many pets went missing in this disaster, but somehow the inclusion of “Snowflake” along with the myriad certainly dead humans struck me as bizarrely funny. Was Snowflake in one of the towers? Who posted this picture? Did her owner somehow not lose their own life (or any human loved ones), but did lose a cat? What was Snowflake doing up there without her owner? Did Snowflake have a job at the WTC? Did Snowflake perhaps go missing in an unrelated calamity, only to have her story completely usurped by the greatest tragedy in American history?
Oliver Stone is known for being pretty picky about what gets included on screen, so this was definitely a choice. It wasn’t a good choice, but it was a choice. -Michael
I’ll be honest, the whole movie gave me flashbacks. It was hard to tell what was real footage from the actual event and what got filmed or created for the movie at times.
There was a scene while Nick and the other cop were waiting to be rescued where a gun was in the same air chamber/space as them and it just started to fire. I think we were supposed to believe that the rounds were “cooking off” from the heat.
I have a really hard time with this one. Yes, it is possible for a bullet to go off from heat, but the heat this takes would kill/cook/burn up any human. There were many service men and thus service weapons in the towers that day. I believe it is possible and likely that some rounds may have cooked off, but none of them shared space in the small pockets that held survivors. – Sarah
What were Nick’s best parts?
Nick’s best scenes were those when he was doing something mundane, like reading the list of cops to join him for the ride to the World Trade Center. He felt like an actual manager doing an actual job with his coworkers. It wasn’t emotional nonsense, he wasn’t over the top, he was just a guy calling out names from a list like just about any manager has probably done a thousand times. It felt real. -Michael
I liked the scene where tower 2 came down. Nick’s reaction and confusion was spot on. I especially liked how he yelled at his men to go towards the elevators. – Sarah
What were Nick’s worst parts?
This movie is a nearly unimaginable 129 minutes long. Nick spends most of it lying motionless in the dark. Nick gets plenty of runway for an over-the-top scream fest. For the most part, he resists the urge, playing the role straight and calm. At one point, though, to illustrate that he is suffering from pain that “comes in waves,” Nick just screams at the top of his lungs for what seems like minutes. It was stupid. -Michael
I felt like the longer the laying the rubble goes on and the weaker Nick’s character is supposed to be, the worse Nick’s acting got. The part I found the worst was when he started mumbling on about how “people don’t like me because I don’t smile a lot”. The delivery was just hard to understand and bad. – Sarah
How was the movie?
Making a movie about the World Trade Center in 2006 was in poor taste. While the filmmaker tried to keep things as sane and realistic as possible, that filmmaker was Oliver Stone. So, he decided to tell the story of two guys who fell in a hole and laid there until someone dug them up. I’m sure that their experience was terrifying and life altering.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t compelling.
It was two guys laying in a hole.
Sure, their families worried (and yelled, and drove around) and the nation trembled, and stuff was crazy. All of that was completely external to these two men, though. None of the “action” taken by the families of these men did anything to help. That’s realistic. Sure. But again, it isn’t compelling.
Stone had a tightrope to walk here, and in the end, he wound up telling a relatively boring and pointless story about “heroic” cops who were wildly unprepared (at no fault of their own) and who ultimately accomplished nothing other than sustaining life altering injuries. Along the way, Stone mythologizes one of the most corrupt police forces in American history. I’m not saying that the real-life individuals depicted weren’t good cops, or that the NYPD didn’t exhibit remarkable bravery on 9/11, but this film painted them in a little too bright a light for my tastes.
I think Oliver Stone was trying to tell a story that showed us the very real impacts that the 9/11 attacks had on real people without making a political statement, or making anyone mad. I think he largely accomplished this. What he failed to accomplish was telling a story that was in any way entertaining. -Michael
The movie was okay. I can’t say it was worth watching. Michael is right, there was so much more interesting parts of that day that could have been the focus. – Sarah
Yeah, but did you like it?
I didn’t watch this in 2006, and I won’t watch it again. It isn’t offensive, but it also isn’t good. -Michael
I didn’t watch this in 2006 because I felt it was too soon. I have to admit I was curious to watch the movie now. I think it did better than I feared it would. I was thinking it may have been offensive and it wasn’t. But I don’t think you’ll ever catch me watching it again. – Sarah
Where can I watch it?
This is currently on eleven streaming platforms. You pick.
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