Review of World Trade Center (2006) by Markb. — 07 Nov 2006

This may not be the most tasteful analogy in the world, but just as 1965 saw a cultural division between "Beatles people" and "Rolling Stones people", and 1994 featured a similar rift between "Pulp Fiction people" and "Forrest Gump people", so will 2006 come to be known as the year in which the "United 93 people" and the "World Trade Center" people squared off.

For the record, count me in the former camp: Paul Greengrass's semidocumentary, semi-fly-on-the-wall reenactment of one aspect of 9/11 was a brilliantly executed (if necessarily harrowing and somewhat depressing) one-of-a-kind masterpiece, while Oliver Stone's interpretation of another is a really, really good made-for-TV movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and the universe is certainly big enough to hold both approaches, but you've got to either credit or criticize Stone for pulling off the daunting task of transforming a national, history-changing tragedy into a film that's second only to Akeelah and the Bee as THE feel-good film of 2006! Stone accomplishes this by focusing on two New York cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) who were pinned under tons of brick, stone and metal awaiting either death or rescue; since falling asleep could very conceivably doom them, each had to keep the other awake, and surprisingly, their very different personalities and temperaments helped considerably: the extremely talkative Jimeno wouldn't LET McLoughlin drift off, while McLoughlin was so taciturn that Jimeno had to take special care on frequent occasions that he was still conscious.

Cage is solid, Pena remarkably good, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary, Sherrybaby) and Maria Bello (Flicka, A History of Violence) are such strong actresses that they make the standard Wives Who Wait roles that you've seen hundreds of times before seem remarkably new.

Much has been said about Oliver Stone's body of work, and while this is certainly atypical in many ways, it also lines up with a common thread to most of his films that isn't often discussed: from Platoon and Wall Street (with their warring good and bad father figures) to the underrated epic Alexander, they're often such effective studies in the qualities of leadership that they could be excerpted and shown in management seminars.

(Even Snoop Dogg has commented that you can watch the Stone-scripted Scarface to learn what Tony Montana did both right and wrong...and who are we to argue with Snoop?) Because of Stone's (partially self-created) reputation as a controversial leftist provocateur, his announced (and almost completely successful) intention to make World Trade Center a totally apolitical film has truly earned him some strange bedfellows: left-of-center website film critic MaryAnn Johansen ("The Flick Filosopher") quite unjustly lists this as second to the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie as the worst of 2006 thus far, while right-wing columnists Cal Thomas and Michael Medved have sung the film's praises to the heavens.