I have always enjoyed the Oliver Stone’s movies – especially Platoon, the best feature film about the Vietnam War. Stone’s edgy paranoia often surprises and delights. So I was expecting some surprises in World Trade Center. I am sorry to report that the film follows a typical Hollywood formula: Stone has transformed a world-altering event into a family melodrama that alternates between crowd-pleasing scenes of individual heroism and sentimental kitsch. Anyone looking for a probing analysis of the broader geopolitical context will be very disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong: WTC is extremely well-done kitsch and will no doubt be a box office hit. For any American who lived through those dark days in 9/2001 watching the film will be a gut-wrenching experience. Because we all have an emotional connection to the attack. For five years in the early 1990’s I walked through the lobby of the WTC every morning on the way to my office at 222 Broadway. There I was nearly shaken off my desk during the first bomb explosion in 1993, and I have friends who barely escaped with their lives on 9/11. Stone’s set is meticulous: he recreates perfectly the concourse level of the Towers, etched into my memory. So the film works at that visceral level. We identify with the working class central characters and their normal families. We all share in the collective memory of that day and its unimaginable horror.
But ultimately the film fails because it simply permits us to replay our emotions of that day without connecting that day with the nightmare that followed, and from which we are still trying to awaken.
There is just one scene, where Stone takes us on a brief tour of the world just after the planes hit towers. The crowds are gathered around video monitors in Paris, in Tokyo, in Cairo and the faces of the people are twisted with horror and grief at what they are seeing. That was the moment when we in America had the whole world behind us and which we have now lost. Stone takes us out in the world for just a moment, but then brings us back into a small circle that grows smaller as the film progresses, so that it concludes as a bürgerliches Trauerspiel (with a happy ending) between the main character (played by a low-key Nicolas Cage) and his wife (played by Maria Bello).
I watched the premier of World Trade Center out in the hinterlands, but Spiegel reporter Sebastian Heinzel was in Manhattan – close to Ground Zero – to see it. Read his impressions here.
