Review of World Trade Center (2006) by Rachel H — 27 Sep 2011

So this is Oliver Stone's World Trade Centre. I have to say I was never really on board with this one and I wasn't proved wrong. The problems with WTC are numerous and there aren't many redeeming features. To start off with there is way to much slow motion. I'm not a fan of slo-mo anyway but if it has to be used dramatic effect it's probably best not to use it every two minutes. As a whole it all feels so forced and perhaps a little insincere. You only need to look as far as Barefoot Gen which was an account of the Hiroshima bombing from a childs perspective to see how this kind of film should be done. That was a film so relentlessly bleak yet beautiful at the same time. There's nothing in WTC that even approaches the same kind of level. What Stone seems to have created is a film which saps all the raw emotion out of a atrocious event.

This poses the question of whether it is (or was in 2006) to early for a 9/11 film. Well firstly my answer is that this barely qualifies as a 9/11 film. This is The Day After Tomorrow masquerading as something a whole lot more significant. Secondly the collection of shorts 'September 11' was released in 2002 and is infinitely more affecting than this. WTC simply just isn't very good; Stone has proved in the past that he can do tragedy in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July but he lived through the Vietnam War, much like Barefoot Gen director Keiji Nakazawa who lived through the bombing as a child. Perhaps it is in this first hand experience and in a particularly personal link to an event that storytelling of this kind can come into its own. WTC feels a lot more cynical than that and it's an uninspiring experience because of it.