World Trade Center movie review (2006)
One other moment that exemplifies how "WTC" loses credibility above ground: a former paramedic (played by the great, underused actor Frank Whaley) who has lost his license finds his better self in helping to rescue Jimeno and McLoughlin. It's movingly done, up until his very last moment in the picture. When a volunteer asks him what he does, Stone cuts to another of those low-angle shots he weilds like a club, and lets a heavy pause hang in the air before he replies: "Paramedic." What an insult -- to the character and the audience. It throws you out of the movie by reminding you that you're watching a Hollywood movie. The scene would have been so much more moving if Stone had not underlined it three times and italicized it. Instead, the character is over-sentimentalized and leeched of some of his humanity in the process.
In other ways, Stone does emphasize the individual human stories. The cause of the devastation is never addressed, except in a few lines of dialog about "those bastards." But, of course, "WTC" is about 9/11, so it can't help but be political -- from its choice of TV clips to what it chooses not to show. As Stone told the New York Times: ''It seems to me that the event was mythologized by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain,'' he says. ''And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.'' Not entirely realistic, but it's a PG-13 movie about mass murder -- somewhat sanitized to reach a wider, and younger, audience.
The problem with movies about individuals in such extreme situations (perhaps especially those that try to hew closely to the accounts of the survivors who lived the events depicted) is that they are stripped of some of their individuality. They are, by necessity, reduced to human essentials, and that doesn't always make for good movie drama. Yes, anyone in this situation would think, and probably say, something like, "Tell my wife and children that I love them." But since we don't know much about who these guys were before 9/11 (presented here as a hazy day rather than the crystal clear fall morning we remember -- where's CGI when you need it?), some moments in "WTC" feel more generic than personal or universal.
