Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #18: World Trade Center

2006 movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Lee Harvey Oswald vacations in New York City and after a wild night on the town, knocks two skyscrapers down. Some policemen get themselves trapped in the rubble and aren't rescued for several days, after somebody watches the Zapruder film and finds out they weren't on the grassy knoll at all and uses the process of elimination to determine that they were being heroes.

Perhaps Oliver Stone should have waited a little more than five years to make a comedy about 9/11. Too soon!
I didn't like this movie much. What I did like was that Oliver Stone avoids recreating any of the more familiar scenes from the "worst tragedy on American soil" (unless you count what white people did to the Native Americans, of course) and gives the point of view of characters who didn't even know what was going on. The collapse scenes were intense and realistic. The rest of the movie where you can barely see the characters trapped in the darkness and chunks of building? Not so much. It seemed endless, possibly the effect that Stone wanted to have, and too often dove into overly-sentimental waters. Nicolas Cage and his mustache were unnecessary; I didn't need any star power to help this story along. And it's impossible to be Nicolas Cage when you're trapped under a bunch of rubble. But anyway, that character didn't need to be played by Nicolas Cage, and it might have been better if he wasn't. This didn't need to be directed by Oliver Stone either. I half-expected to get a scene where Dick Cheney is flying one of the planes or something. World Trade Center is completely unnecessary. It adds nothing new to the day's folklore and says nothing that couldn't have been covered in an editorial that would have taken me five minutes to read.