World Trade Center (2006)
Paramount DVD (regions 1, 2, 4)
d. Oliver Stone; pr. Moritz Borman, Debra Hill, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher; scr. Andrea Berloff; ph. Seamus McGarvey; m. Craig Armstrong; ed. David brenner, Julie Monroe; cast. Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Stephen Dorff, Frank Whaley, Connor Paolo, Jay Hernandez, Will Jemino (129 mins)
Two New York City Port Authority policeman (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) are trapped in the rubble of the collapsing World Trade Center on 9-11, 2001. As they bond, unable to move, rescue efforts above them continue. When all hope seems lost, a lone Marine takes it upon himself to join the search, eventually leading to the rescue of the two trapped men, the only survivors of the WTC collapse.
World Trade Center is not a terrorist movie although it takes place on 9-11. Rather, it takes on the crisis management subtext of the traditional disaster movie that also influenced United 93, the first movie on terrorism post 9-11. However, where United 93 sought to apply this in order to re-invent the terrorist subgenre through its dramatization of a hostage crisis, World Trade Center is content to be a sentimental, old-fashioned disaster movie which just happens to have 9-11 as a context. Indeed, the lack of any sustained political discourse beyond the most conventional of feel-good American patriotism makes this film one of director Oliver Stone’s least impressive works – and as a pre-cursor to Stone’s tackling of the War on Terror president in his subsequent planned biopic of George W. Bush is almost irrelevant.
World Trade Center does address the concept of an American identity pre- and post- national disaster. It happens to take place on 9-11 and by default that national disaster it addresses is the result of terrorism, but the film does not address the terrorism. Rather, it concentrates on the actuality of the disaster – the collapse of the twin towers, the people trapped inside, the heroic attempts to rescue survivors – and takes the sole survivor story of the collapsing World Trade Center and elevates it to the status of modern American legend. World Trade Center focuses on 9-11 as the contemporary equivalent of a loss of national innocence, an event which for Stone galvanized the country into a mix of patriotism and sentimentality, qualities which infect his treatment of the plot.
The simple story of trapped survivors, however, relates back to what was central to the cinema of terrorism – the crisis of self-determination. Here, the struggle for survival is the battle to re-gain self-determination, both individual and national. Thus, for Stone, the rescue of the two trapped men is a triumphant moment in the push towards the regaining of a national self-determination threatened by the events of 9-11 and terrorism. Hence, it is the efforts of a lone Patriotic marine doing his duty for his country as he sees it by combing “Ground Zero” for trapped survivors that enables the individual and national triumph here: a plot development that would be impossibly hackneyed were it not apparently true. Either way: patriotism and the restoration of national pride are Stone’s agenda here as he sees 9-11 as a wounding of American pride, eventually restored by the recovery effort. In this way, the film relates to the end of United 93, where it is the restoration of self-determination that allows America to mark its injuries and continue as the great nation it is. However, the vividness of the collapsing tower scenes and the depiction of New York City in the grip of a national emergency recurred in, of all things, the non-terrorist monster movie Cloverfield.
Although Stone can be commended for the humanism he brings to much of this movie, the mounting patriotic sentiment renders the film unforgivably mawkish in its resolution and World Trade Center emerges as little more than a competent disaster movie straining for national significance in its familiar dramatics. However, dramatizing the events of 9-11 seems a necessary stage in the advance of the terrorist movie and it is this function that is best filled by Stone’s movie, though it offers the terrorist sub-genre little in comparison to United 93 and emerges a piece of effective, but strained, survivalist sentiment – extolling the determination of the American character to survive whatever obstacles are thrown its way. World Trade Center may be a “modern classic” of American patriotic filmmaking, but it is only incidentally a terrorist movie and more a mythic evocation of “Ground Zero”.
Additional Reading
extract from Film Talk: Quoting the Movies in the Age of DVD
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