by MARK SLUTSKY

More than a few eyebrows were raised when Oliver Stone announced he’d be making the first fiction film based on 9/11 to actually take place at the World Trade Center (the other American film to be set on that day was of course Paul Greengrass’s United 93). How would Hollywood’s arguably most gonzo filmmaker tackle a subject as loaded with political and emotional baggage as September 11? Would it be an elaborate conspiracy theory? A drug-fuelled fugue? An angry political parable?

World Trade Center is none of these things. In fact, it doesn’t even come close to the tone of Stone’s recent work. He might be a director known for his excesses—artistic, personal and otherwise—but here he’s produced a remarkably controlled film with an intense, wilful focus on one particular slice of the story.

The movie begins in the wee hours of September 11, 2001. Port Authority Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and the younger cops (portrayed by Jay Hernandez, Michael Peña and others) under his charge wake up, drive into Manhattan, and begin their day. They hear that a plane has hit one of the WTC towers. They head down there. It’s chaos. They enter the WTC concourse and try to figure out where to go next. The towers fall down on them.

And that’s the first, riveting 20–30 minutes or so of the film. The rest is spent literally underground with Cage and his team-mates, buried alive in a dark hell of twisted girders, pipes and concrete, and with their families, as they frantically try to figure out where their loved ones are.

World Trade Center is almost entirely about these people and told from their perspectives. You only see an exterior view of the towers falling via playbacks on people’s TVs; the actual collapse, when it happens, is shown from the inside of the buildings, where the Port Authority cops are, and it’s harrowing.

It’s so much from their perspective that it’s almost entirely apolitical. World Trade Center exists entirely in the moment; it’s about what’s happening, not why. It’s a little shocking, for Oliver Stone; I half-expected (and hoped) that Donald Sutherland would pop up after the credits rolled and explain what really went down.

But no, for better or worse, this is a story about a handful of people caught up in events much larger than them, and nothing beyond that. It’s also a genre movie—a sappy tearjerker, really—but for what it’s worth Stone employs the devices of the heroic, inspirational movie very skilfully.

Whatever your stance on 9/11 and its aftermath, this is a moving story and told with more subtlety than you might expect, despite its sentimental trappings. Like Stone, the often-flamboyant Cage is also restrained here, with a character that plays against the gruff Sarge type. He’s vulnerable and not particularly heroic; he doesn’t save anybody’s life.

You might think there’s no point to making a movie like this; maybe it’s just not appropriate. Regardless, there’s no doubt that World Trade Center is a surprisingly well-made film about a painful subject.

World Trade Center opens Friday, Aug. 11

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