Cinema: Speak for yourselves

Oliver Stone doesn't let the courageous and generous characters in World Trade Center tell their own tales; instead he jumps in at every opportunity to amp up the pathos, says Declan Burke

'There is no plan," announces Port Authority Police Department officer John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) as he speeds with his men towards the smoking World Trade Centre on the morning of 11 September, 2001. It's a short enough line, but one that comes freighted will all kinds of baggage. It conveys the shock and horror of a moment so mind-bogglingly unimaginable that there is no contingency plan; it tells us the scale of the disaster awaiting our brave heroes; and it foreshadows the courageous willingness of Americans to volunteer, rally around and help, regardless of the hellish conditions that await them.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, World Trade Center depends heavily on its back-story, in a way that few other movies have done, for its narrative to work; even more unfortunately, Oliver Stone takes the all-too-eloquent emotional impact of that back-story and cranks it up to unbearable levels. In essence, the movie tells the story of McLoughlin and his subordinate Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), who find themselves fighting for life after being pinned down beneath the rubble of a collapsed building; meanwhile, in a bright, fresh, early-autumn New York, untouched by the attack, their families and friends wait for news. These stories, all of which are based on eye-witness testimony, are threaded through by that of ex-Marine Antonio Rodrigues (Armando Riesco), who dons his old fatigues and sets out for Ground Zero to search for missing people.

It's difficult to criticise World Trade Center without sounding anti-American, but the courage, self-sufficiency and willingness to pitch in sketched out here do not get the tribute they deserve from Stone. Where the generosity and fortitude should speak for themselves, there is always the feeling that Stone is leaning over their shoulders with a loud hailer; and with Nicolas Cage, never the most expressive of actors, pinned under rubble and forced to act with that hangdog expression alone, Stone takes every opportunity to amp up the pathos elsewhere. The net result is a form of emotional bullying, as we are none-too-subtly chaperoned towards the big finale, when – as we know from the beginning – the survivors emerge from the wreckage of the buildings and, in a final coda, their shattered lives.

Curiously, though Stone is a filmmaker who is notorious for his conspiracy theories, there is no attempt to touch on the reasons behind the September 11 attack; nor is there any investigation into how well, or otherwise, the authorities were prepared for such a disaster, given their experience of the 1993 attack on the same building complex. Instead Stone gives us clunky metaphors for hope, illumination and rebirth ("Can you still see the light?"), and in doing so, comes very close to producing a propaganda epic as worthy/unworthy as Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour. It's a shame, and a wasted opportunity, because the stories here deserve a less mythic, more human retelling.

World Trade Center **