Reviews of World Trade Center
A Film by Oliver Stone About Two Survivors
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The 9-11 Research
companion to the film World Trade Center by Jim Hoffman |
Following are excerpts of reviews of early screenings of the film.
Following "Alexander" with a straightforward, conspiracy-free 9/11 story -- the improbable rescue and rehabilitation of Port Authority police officers from World Trade Center rubble -- might seem like a ploy to get back iAn the game. While different from Stone's usual filmic ideas, "World Trade Center" is far from an impersonal project for professional atonement.
The power of broadly defined faith, whether love for a deity or spouse, to sustain in times of crisis propels this movie, saturated with spiritualism, although not to the point of becoming a religious tract. Stone's hallmark hallucination scenes (this time of a blotched-out Jesus holding water) are as close as that gets. Rather, the infrequently crossed line here is his tendency toward exploitation.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1158187...
Sadly, "World Trade Center" is a bubbly, fluffy film about families crying. It is a simple survival story and nothing more, and is a sloppy one at that. Despite the cast and talent involved, the movie is nothing more than a TV movie shown on the big screen. It lacks the focus, sincerity, believability and intensity that a movie like this deserves and could so easily be had, especially by a director such as Stone.
http://www.movie-source.com/movie_page.asp?movieID=2331
The following reviewer suggests that Stone laced the film with clues that the Twin Towers and Building 7 were taken down by controlled demolition. However, the film does not emphasize explosions in a way that indicates explosives in the buildings. The popping sounds that the men hear as they walk through the concourse could be any of a number of things, including jumpers impacting the ground. As for the footage of Building 7 imploding, it is brief and incidental.
To sum it up, Stone not only did a good job in relating the story of these men and for conveying the emotional and psychological trauma that occurred to them and their families, but for also conveying the message that there are problems with the official story. By emphasizing the explosions, showing the collapse of Building 7 and implying Thermite usage, I believe that he was trying to wake people up to these important issues.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/07/26/18291754.php
One thing this movie got right was the little details. In one scene one of the officers claims that he heard a missile missed the Pentagon. The misinformation that ran rampant that day was incredible.
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What's most shocking about this film is how straight and narrow Oliver Stone chose to tell it. Stone is notoriously known for directing historical films in a controversial way. Not only is the film missing a conspiracy theory, it's missing it's originality. Again, that's not a bad thing. But watching this film you would have no idea it was an Oliver Stone film. Even his camera angles are shot dead on.
http://www.slashfilm.com/article.php/20060724worldtradecentereview
Oliver Stone Gets Patriotic With 'World Trade Center'
So how is it that an uplifting, unabashedly sentimental drama -- our first look at the selflessness that followed in the hours after the terrorist attacks -- was made by Oliver Stone? This is, after all, Hollywood's prince of darkness, the man who not only brought us such wild-eyed fare as "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers," but who also, soon after the attacks, referred to the catastrophe as "the revolt on Sept. 11," linking it to a rebellion against six media companies who "run the world"?
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-goldstein8aug08,1,394774. story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true
This humurous piece in theOnion.com has Stone promoting the 'single plane' theory -- a parody of the magic single bullet theory endorsed by the Warren Commission. The 'single plane' theory is only slightly more ridiculous than some of the material that is packaged as 9/11 Truth.
New Oliver Stone 9/11 Film Introduces 'Single Plane' Theory
After its collision with the center of American military operations, the so-called "magic plane"—which variously and ingeniously identified itself to air-traffic controllers as "American Airlines Flight 11," "United Airlines Flight 175," "American Airlines Flight 77" and "United Airlines Flight 93"—took to the skies once again, landing at a top-secret "black-ops" Air Force base in West Virginia, where it was reloaded with a group of clones from another shadowy government program that Stone described as "shocking."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51367