Jake Jansen Grade: BFifteen years ago, the most horrible event of the Millennium accord. Instead of center the film on the event itself, Oliver Stone decided to focus on two police officers who were trapped in a collapsed elevator shaft while responding to the event.The building crash is never shown on screen. You get glimpses of it through radio and television broadcasts. By doing this, it allows us to experience the event through the eyes of the responders who had no idea what had just happened.The film spends around 45 minuets diving into the backstory of these two officer's lives. The film attempts to make these people out as heroes, but the officers are presented as being no different than any other human being, they just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

James I watched this for the first time nine years on from its year of production and nearly 14 on from the actual event. Happily, I turned to the IMDb reviews only after seeing the film, and find it surprising how much negativity there is around. The destruction of the World Trade Centre is obviously too big a story to tell in any single film, and it is also a story that should not be told in that way - in a non-documentary film - ever. But that does not mean that the event should not be dealt with at all, and here the focus is primarily on a rescue - one of the very few, and the rescuers - of which there were very, very many, including the rather incongruous bunch presented in this (true-story) film. The fact that the act of terror took most of its victims outright in a variety of more or less horrible ways does not mean that we "crow" or paint a ludicrously optimistic picture if we focus in one film on people who were actually rescued. Nor does it mean that we paint an unsubtle, gung-ho picture if we view recreations of the work of the hundreds (thousands?) who risked their lives (and very definitely their health, given the severe pollution on site) in the desperate hope that more might be extracted from the rubble. Indeed, to me this was not a particularly jingoistic presentation (and one would not particularly expect one from Oliver Stone). But it is moving and does inspire patriotism for humanity, as opposed to merely the United States. This is inevitable, natural and right, given that these are recreations of real events, and happily full of the weird, chancy, ad hoc, eclectic features that real-life events almost always present. Ultimately, then, a true story is told in a moving way (how could it be otherwise, given the circumstances?), and there is no reason I can see to dismiss this film (as so many have seemed to) as exploitative, over-emotional, over-patriotic or too inclined to focus on the few survivors, or anything else. This is a story worth telling, needing telling, and I did still feel enlightened further as regards the catastrophic and barbarous September 11 events. These cannot be bad things...

mariondowning-427-469344 So I heard that 10% of the money earned from this movie was going to 9/11 charities to help survivors and families of to poor souls who died. Except, over 60 million dollars was wasted on this and it didn't even make a million dollars. The families and survivors would have been better off if Mr Stone just drove vans filled with the money wasted on this up to their doors. I would have had more respect for him than I do after watching this waste of time and money. I doubt any of them have watched it because they know what happened to themselves or their loved ones. I really hope some of those actors gave their money made from this to the families and survivors. How disappointing (I can't believe this got any reviews above 5 that weren't driven by national pride or feelings of guilt).

morphricky This movie obviously have good intentions when the actual survivors helped write this, but in the end, it left me unaffected and bored.I actually had to stop the movie once and watch it a couple of days later. This is a movie right? It feels more like an audio-book since more than half of the movie takes place in darkness. You can barely make out the people on screen and I actually felt relieved in the scene where fire comes flying by the actors. Finally we can see something! Of course the fire dies out and the screen turns so dark I can see my own reflection. I have seen plenty of other movies and documentaries where people are trapped and it really doesn't need to be this dark. The script is a complete disaster. When Jimeno is brought to the hospital and his wife talks to him... I actually felt bad for the actors. It was so cheesy and so predictable it made me cringe. In fact, most of the script in this movie is either incredibly cheesy or way over the top. I felt bad for McLoughlin having to listen to Jimeno while they are trapped, his voice becomes nails on a chalkboard. So as you can imagine: Having to listen to that grating voice while you can barely make out the characters or anything on the screen... ugh!I feel bad writing this as I know the two wives helped write this, but I found both their characters annoying. And their relatives were as well, especially Jimenos relatives. They seemed to come from those comedies where the in-laws/relatives are obnoxious and pure horror to be around. One of Donnas children comes off as a spoiled brat with no manners and the rest of the children are fillers with no personality. Heck, even the wives themselves have no personality, they are just whining and crying that they are missing their husbands. When they are reunited with their husbands I felt nothing! The only character who seemed remotely like-able and I wanted to give a hug was the black woman at the hospital. And she was on the screen for tops 5 minutes. Maggie's character (who I honestly can't remember the name of) is apparently so distraught that her relatives gets her medication to prevent a miscarriage, but you never get the feeling of her being this distressed. Most of the time she just walks around with the same expression on her face, you can never tell what she is feeling. When they actually suggest to the character the medication she just seems like she would say "Okay, sure." with a shrug on the shoulders. But because of her constant devoid staring, I have no clue what the character was supposed to feel.I feel this movie would have been much better if the movie had started with developing the families in their every day life, then have the disaster and them worried about their husbands. These random flashbacks while they are trapped makes it very hard to relate to anyone of them. I'm sure the real people are a lot more interesting than portrayed in this movie and I felt more sorry for the people involved by reading about the survivors on Wikipedia than while watching this "audio-book" devoid of emotion.