Simon Crossley (harrcross)

World Trade Center starts like New York is like any other ordinary day.

The director Oliver Stone takes us through the daily routines of uniformed officers. As the movie progresses this is panned out to tell the back stories of families, wives and friends. This is America under attack.

Actually there is little run up, no explanation of what was about to come, it quickly gets to the gist of the movie which is the officers stuck under the tower. In this respect there is a respectful avoidance of dramatising the shock of the event in detail, and more a familiar tale along the lines of Saving Captain Ryan ? a courageous story about how we saved our men captured by the enemy in this case transit cops stuck under a collapsed building.

Stone embeds seamless special effects the tons of masonry crashing down, the scarred landscape of the ironwork. Stone fully captures the monumental enormity of the situation.

The bulk of the movie focuses on two of the cops trapped under the remains of the tower. It is dark and claustrophobic but somehow lacks the fear we expect to see being in a cave or submarine. Instead there is the disruption and uncertainty it causes to families and flashbacks from their family lives. Stone takes us down a soft populist road instead. Stone is guilty here of pushing the usual emotional buttons of Hollywood disaster movie instead of a true gritty look at the horror underneath the wreckage.

This is a restrained movie without the usual Stone motifs around edgy themes and political tension. It focuses on the working man that defines America. Which could make it Stone?s most optimistic film. The only weirdness appears in quirky Jesus visions.

This is a mainstream movie that successfully avoids any political buttons in favour of squeezing every tear possible out of you. It is traditional family values coupled with military stamina.
This is possibly not the defining movie about the World Trade Center. It shies away from the verite style of Flight 93 by Greengrass, anything remotely political and the real horror of being under the collapse of the tower. In that respect it is a family mainstream movie without little to offer on the horror of 9/11.

Duncan Jones? feature is a promising thoughtful debut.
More Solaris than Star Trek this is a psychological thriller, it lacks the full-on effects of Terminator in preference for a neat concept. There are no aliens as in ?Alien? it is a human tale.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) plays an astronaut reaching the end of his three-year stint in mining resources on the moon. For company he has the ship?s computer voiced by Kevin Spacey. Gerty is more Mother (Alien) than HAL from 2001 in how its human speech helps Sam. The story starts off mundanely with Sam suffering hallucinations and crashing his space rover.
The story goes bizarre as he discovers there are two of him. With much play around his identity he begins to form a friendship with his double. This at first appears ridiculous until you remind yourself he is in space on his own. Rockwell shows real depth in handling the ongoing breakdown of his marriage through the monitor updates.
The set designs are basic and unconvincing at times. As the story unravels it opens up with a hidden level and a shocking commercial motive. It?s a tense and cleverly thought-out proposition that enables us to tolerate the slowness of the plot. While this drip-feeding lacks any dramatic twist it has much still to tell us: the slow burn of Bell?s downfall is counter balanced by his double?s reaction.
A conceptual sci-fi story which is sensibly directed. This is no blockbuster but has much to offer.