christopher-hill.com

World Trade Centre

I just watched the new Oliver Stone film - World Trade Centre. It is astonishingly bad. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it is so bad that it is a disgrace that it's been released. If the studio responsible for it had any kind of humanity they would have not only refused to release it, but also burnt the negatives, sending a message to Stone and all other film makers that the deaths of 3,o00 people in a single event deserves more than soap opera style hackery.
This is the third film that I've seen that has dealt with 9/11. The first was Spike Lee's 25th Hour, a film set in the aftermath of the attack in New York which tells the story of a man facing up to his past and his future against the backdrop of a city doing the same. The seamless intertwining of these two stories told a single narrative that is probably the most honest film about 9/11 that will ever be made. This is in no small part because it was made just a few months after the actual attacks, before they were tainted by politics and wars and rhetoric.
Paul Greengrass's film United 93, was the first film to re-live the actual events of the day, and it does so soberly. You are not told what to think, you are not told how to feel, you are simply shown what you already know to have happened but from a different perspective: the perspective of those that actually lived it, rather than through the prism of the news media. By sticking almost entirely to the events as they were outlined in the 9/11 Commission, Greengrass delivered a powerful and honest film.
Unlike Spike Lee and Paul Greengrass, Oliver Stone believes that the only way audiences will understand the tragedy of the day is through him turning to every cheap TV movie hack in the book to help us out. I am even struggling to bring myself to repeat some of the lines from the film here. Every time I try I just shudder; partly out of embarrassment, partly out of anger, partly because I can't quite believe what I've just witnessed. If I write that when the tower collapsed, Nic Cage shouts in slow motion "Rrrrrruuuuuunnnnnn....iiiiinnnntttttooo tthheee eeeellllleeeevvvvaaatttoooorrr" and it came across exactly like those slo-mo parodies that are Ben Stiller's trademark, or if I tell you that towards the end of the film the endless drone of schlock strings pauses just long enough for Nic Cage to turn to his wife and say "You kept me alive" before the strings erupt again in an orgy of cheese, I can't help thinking that someone might turn to me and say, "No Chris, you idiot, what you've done there is you gone and watched a parody of Stone's film that was originally uploaded to You Tube by some undergrad film student as a laugh - the real film is nothing like that."
Please, don't pay to see this film, because if you do you will be legitimizing not only lazy film making, but also the further cheapening of 9/11. The politicians have done it, the media have done it, we really really don't need film makers thinking they can get away with it too.

Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:19 PM