World Trade Center (2006)

The film begins by depicting the sheer ordinariness of that morning, though a hint of Craig Armstrong's ominous score, and the way the camera keeps turning towards those towers on the horizon, lets us know the day won't stay that way. The characters, meanwhile, remain innocent of what is to come. Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) wakes up early and silently checks in on his sleeping children before going to work at the Port Authority Police Department. Fellow officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) also drives into Manhattan, and kids around with his colleagues in the locker room. The police are told to be on the lookout for a runaway girl, and Jimeno tells a homeless man not to loiter on public property. It's all very routine.

Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin

And then the first World Trade tower is struck. Stone, to his credit, does not go for the obvious money shots here; he does not mimic the news footage that we have all seen by recreating it with the latest developments in special effects. Instead, he depicts the first plane as a shadow cast against a New York skyscraper. The second plane is not depicted at all; instead, as McLoughlin, Jimeno and their colleagues make their way to the World Trade Center on a commandeered bus, one of them is told about the second attack while talking to his wife on his cell phone. The other officers don't believe him—surely there must be some mistake—but then the bus turns a corner and they find themselves staring at the evidence, down the road.

By restricting what we see and hear to what the characters saw and heard, Stone allows us to experience their confusion and bewilderment. But if he avoids the obvious images, he also creates new images which, in their own way, also draw us into their experience. We see papers fall from the sky like overgrown snowflakes, and horrific images of people plunging to their deaths in the distance. And as McLoughlin and his colleagues stand in front of the tower, we are struck by how incredibly huge it is, and by how small this tiny group of tiny men is.

Michael Peña as Will Jimeno, trapped under the rubble

Even so, undaunted by the sheer scale of their mission, McLoughlin, Jimeno, and a couple of their fellow officers enter the building—but they have barely had time to find the equipment they need before one of the towers collapses, burying them in rubble. And there they remain for the duration of the movie. One of their colleagues survives the collapse of the first tower, only to be killed when the second tower collapses and pours even more debris down upon them. So it is left to McLoughlin and Jimeno, pinned down several feet apart from each other and mostly unable to move, to keep each other awake and to hope for a rescue before they die.

Stone, working from a script by newcomer Andrea Berloff, alternates between the trapped men and their homes—sometimes showing, in flashback, what life was like before the attacks, and sometimes showing how the families of these men try to cope with the fact that they have no idea what has happened to their loved ones. There are odd moments of humor, such as when McLoughlin tells Jimeno that he must survive so that he can finish remodelling the kitchen for his wife Donna (Maria Bello), or when Jimeno recalls disagreeing with his pregnant wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) over what to name their next child; such concerns might seem trivial in the face of death or an attack against the nation, and yet there is value in such details, because it is through them that intimate relationships are forged.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jimeno, concerned about her husband's safety

At the same time, the film does not shy away from the more negative effects of the stress that these families endure. We like to tell ourselves that we would bond together and stand up for each other in moments of crisis—and, broadly speaking, that is what World Trade Center shows people doing. But emergencies can also bring out our darker impulses, and there are scenes here of family members snapping at each other that feel awkwardly authentic. This film has been compared to the films of Ron Howard—especially Apollo 13, which also tells a true story of men trapped in life-threatening circumstances and the loved ones who must watch it all on TV—but there is a sharpness to these scenes that cuts just a little deeper.

The film also has a surprisingly high degree of Christian content. It's there in the crucifixes that adorn the walls of private homes and hang from rescuers' necks; it's there in the Lord's Prayer that McLoughlin shouts in a moment of peril; it's there in a startling vision that Jimeno has when he slips into unconsciousness. It is especially there in a subplot involving David Karnes (Michael Shannon), a former marine who abandons his job in Connecticut, gets a haircut, and puts his old fatigues back on—all because he believes that God is calling him to New York. And once he gets there, he plays a key role in finding McLoughlin and Jimeno under all that rubble.

William Mapother and Michael Shannon as Marines helping in the rescue operations

How you respond to the film's depiction of Karnes may affect how you respond to the claim, frequently made in recent weeks, that Stone's film is "non-political." Unlike United 93, the Paul Greengrass film which focused on the terrorists and their plot against the United States, World Trade Center keeps the villains so far offscreen you could almost mistake it for a movie-of-the-week about a mining accident. It is Karnes who keeps the bigger political picture in view, by saying things like, "We're at war," or, "We're gonna need some good men out there to avenge this."

The film might be simply reporting, as honestly as it can, how the real-life Karnes reacted to the events of that day, and some will argue that this film supports current war efforts by reminding a forgetful public just why we are at war in the first place. Then again, the film subtly plays on the notion that current war efforts may be driven by an apocalyptic evangelical sensibility that some would say is just as problematic as the radical Muslim belief in jihad; before going to New York, Karnes meets his pastor, and the scene is set by a shot of a Bible opened to the first page of Revelation.

Whatever hints Stone might be dropping, he has at least done a superb job of capturing on film what that awful day was like. There are missteps along the way—among other things, the sudden appearance, late in the game, of relatively well-known actors like Stephen Dorff and Frank Whaley as rescue workers almost pulls you out of the movie—but for the most part, it works. If United 93 was the insider's version, with scenes set at command centers and aboard one of the hijacked planes, World Trade Center allows us to relive the experience from the outsider's point of view. In one scene, Jimeno's wife walks down a lonely street late at night, and all the windows in all the houses glow in unison with the light of a single TV broadcast. Anyone who lived through that day will remember exactly what that was like.