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being of the persuasion that the existence of this move is pretty shameful in itself i'm gonna be biased towards bad reviews of it...
peter bradshaw is the main film critic for the guardian. i don't always agree with his opinions of movies but his reviews are always good to read; he's a good writer, i think.
the below is a tour de force of dissing a movie,
"World Trade Center
Cert 12A
Peter Bradshaw
Friday September 29, 2006
The Guardian
'A big, wilfully dumb movie' ... World Trade Center
There are some films so awful, of such insidious dishonesty and mediocrity, that their existence is a kind of scandal. Roberto Benigni's sentimental Holocaust movie Life Is Beautiful was one such, and now here is another. Oliver Stone's grotesquely boring and badly acted TV-movie-style World Trade Center spectacularly fails to do justice either to the global, geo-political nightmare of 9/11 or even to its ostensible subject: the courage of New Yorkers who risked their lives to help others that day.
Article continues
It should not be possible to make a dull film on this subject, and yet Oliver Stone has managed it: a big, wilfully dumb, reactionary clunker of a movie that succeeds in cancelling the drama and avoiding all the history and the ideas. It is a fictionalised version of a true-life story. Two Port Authority cops, Jim McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) were part of a rescue team buried in the rubble, and were themselves rescued against incredible odds by Dave Karnes, an accountant and US Marine Corps reservist. Karnes, enraged by the terrorist attack and feeling a Christian-patriot calling to help, drove to New York from his Connecticut home, pulled on his uniform, made his way into the Ground Zero danger zone and clambered up the terrifyingly precarious mountain of masonry, on a personal mission to find survivors.Stone never puts a foot right. He uses lumberingly misjudged state-funeral camerawork and elegaic music actually before, and during, the horrific attack itself, smothering its dramatic impact in a hundredweight of scented cotton wool. And he insists on performances of utter fakeness from everyone. Once his heroes are trapped in that hellish tomb, Stone has nothing to say about them as real human beings with complex emotions, preferring stoical grit. All we are left with is two hours of boredom. One of their trapped comrades, overwhelmed with despair, appears to kill himself with his revolver. Or does he? Evidently, showing one of the 9/11 hero-saints committing suicide is unthinkable for Stone, so he fudges the issue by having this man fire bafflingly into the air and then sort of expire afterwards. "He's gone," says one brother officer. Uh, yeah. I guess he has.
We intercut between this Stygian nightmare of dullness and the fraught drama of the lip-quivering womenfolk, and these people are like nothing on earth. Maria Bello, playing one of the doe-eyed spouses, has blue contact lenses that reduce her pupils to the size of needlepoints and make her look like a Stepford Wife. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the other devoted life-partner and, like Bello, she gives a massively supercilious performance. The most outrageously Marie Antoinette-ish is Donna Murphy, who plays one of their drawn, lachrymose friends, like the star of an infomercial for something tasteful and discreet. These sleek Hollywood showponies are about as far from real human beings as Earth is from Alpha Centauri: they look like L'Oreal models in peril, twittering and wittering as the guys pull up outside in their squad cars and station wagons. Compare them, or anyone else from this film, with Paul Greengrass's United 93, that magnificently real tribute to American courage, and the sheer phoney-baloneyness of everything is just embarrassing.
The worst is yet to come. Stone has apparently instructed Michael Shannon, playing the Marine Corps hero Karnes, to walk around like a stone-eyed serial killer on anti-depressants. "Think Hannibal Lecter!" he must have yelled at him through his megaphone. "Think Jeffrey Dahmer!" When the nightmare is over, Karnes gets out his cellphone to inform his loved ones of his desire to re-enlist, and has what is effectively the movie's last word: "They're gonna need some good men out there - to revenge this." Out "there"? Where exactly? Over the closing credits, we get the answer in white titles on a black background. Karnes served two tours in Iraq.
Well, it's true: he did, although in real life he appears to have been stationed in the Philippines first, which doesn't have quite the same ring to it. In making and banging the drum for this boneheaded link between 9/11 and Iraq, Oliver Stone has voluntarily chopped about 100 points off his own IQ.
Not even the most egregious neocon nincompoop still believes that 9/11 had anything to do with Saddam - so what is the erstwhile beady-eyed king of the conspiracy theories doing here? Being ironic? Obviously not. Could it be that like many a tough-guy liberal of a certain age, Stone is trying to out-macho his conservative tormentors? Maybe. My own theory is that Oliver Stone's auto-lobotomy is an act of sentimental primitivism, a misjudged tribute to the innocent patriotic beliefs of a fondly imagined yeoman class of blue-collar Americans.
What a shaming spectacle. In this paper, Natasha Walter recently had a brilliant, sceptical essay, wondering if the big-hitting novelists of the English-speaking world had really done enough to imagine the terrorists' worldview. It's a good question - and one that could be asked of cinema. There have been some bold and honourable movies. Antonia Bird's The Hamburg Cell was a thrilling investigation of this subject. Paul Greengrass's United 93 was a head-on dramatic act of courage.
And Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, though deplored by many liberals who felt that complaisant fence-sitting was the more responsible approach, was a terrific polemic, and every day that goes past makes Moore look better, and his detractors more obtuse. But I fear all these movies are going to be temporarily bullied into the margins by this great big, malign village idiot of a film, which sets the bar very low, and which fatuously endorses the biggest political untruth of modern times. Just thinking about it gives me a headache."
sounds great.
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