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World Trade Center

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 115 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Andrea Berloff
John McLoughlin. Donna McLoughlin, William Jimeno and Allison Jimeno (true story)
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Release Date:
Theatrical: August 9, 2006
DVD: December 12, 2006
Running Time: 129 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for intense and emotional content, some disturbing images and language
Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Jay Hernandez, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Stephen Dorff, Michael Shannon, and Patti D'Arbanville
September 11, 2001 was an unusually warm day in New York. Will Jimeno, an officer with the Port Authority Police Department, was tempted to take a personal day to enjoy his hobby of bow hunting, but ultimately decided that he would go to work. Sergeant John McLoughlin, a respected veteran of the PAPD, had been up for hours – a requirement of his daily, 1½-hour trek to the city. They and their colleagues made their way to midtown Manhattan, just like they did any other day. Only this wasn't any other day. (Paramount)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Alexander Any Given Sunday Born on the Fourth of July JFK Natural Born Killers Nixon The Doors U Turn Wall Street
TV: The Path To 9/11
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Newsweek David Ansen
World Trade Center celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Perhaps, in the future, the times will call for more challenging, or polemical, or subversive visions. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
This is a film of terrific selectivity. By focusing on two of the few who did survive the collapse, the film achieves emotional power and an uplifting ending.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Mr. Stone has taken a public tragedy and turned it into something at once genuinely stirring and terribly sad. His film offers both a harrowing return to a singular, disastrous episode in the recent past and a refuge from the ugly, depressing realities of its aftermath.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The strong personalities of Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who play typical supportive wives, keep scenes from sagging.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
World Trade Center is Stone's most potent motion picture since "Platoon," and may be the most accessible across-the-board since "Wall Street."
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The lack of stellar performances gradually becomes a virtue of the movie as we forget we're watching actors in roles, and Stone builds a documentarylike veracity that gives the saga of the trapped cops and their loved ones a riveting immediacy.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
At its best it shares with Stone's finest work a feeling for the imminence of death and salvation.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
Even without his box of political tricks, Oliver Stone remains the foremost cinematic shrink for America's distress.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It may not tell us anything about terror in the new millennium, but the filmmakers' work is solid and affecting. In its own over-emphatic, sometimes clumsy way, it can move an audience to tears, cathartic laughs and cheers.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
One reason World Trade Center is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
A physically impressive, well-acted, sometimes emotionally powerful - and mostly apolitical - re-creation of that awful day that has some conservative pundits praising Stone as some sort of born-again patriot.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
Where "United 93" was lean and merciless and got you thinking hard about how you might conduct yourself in a no-win situation, World Trade Center is reassuring.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Where "United 93" was a superb example of masterful storytelling, World Trade Center is a more conventional rendering.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
A straightforward, earnest, sentimental picture: It's all the things you'd think a Sept. 11 movie directed by Oliver Stone would never be.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.
Read Full Review >Variety Brian Lowry
World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Stone has concentrated on one of the catastrophe's stories and has fashioned it well--with almost palpable physical detail, and with performances that never sink to exploitation.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Although the conclusion is heavily sentimentalized, Stone finds the common ground Americans can rally around for relief from the devastation: We are, in the final analysis, good people.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Like Stone's "Platoon," World Trade Center has the visceral stuff it takes to appeal to audiences of all political stripes. Unlike "Platoon," however, its sense of craft feels impersonal.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Despite the best efforts of the cast (Cage is especially evocative in a literally confined role), Stone can't disguise the fact that his movie, like his heroes, has come to a kinetic halt, stuck between a narrative rock and an emotional hard place.
Read Full Review >Premiere Aaron Hillis
Underscored by the fragility of a plinking piano and well-timed flourishes to uplift, this heroic heartstring-tugger is still frequently and unexpectedly affecting, so much that it's able to hide its true face as a glorified movie-of-the-week.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest -- who could have imagined?
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
When Stone's movie is at its best, it simply ignores the temptation to say everything about 9/11, instead keeping its focus tightly trained on the two domestic dramas at its center.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
A true story of courage and survival, yes. But viewing the destruction of the World Trade Center--in a film called World Trade Center--through this kind of prism represents a distinctly Hollywood brand of tunnel vision.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The problem is not so much that World Trade Center is an attempt to make a feel-good movie about a ghastly situation, it's that the result feels forced, manufactured and largely -- but not entirely -- unconvincing.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
World Trade Center shows us many things we already know, though with impressive flair, then plunges underground for an unconvincing drama based on a multitude of facts. It's upbeat, all right, but badly off kilter.
Washington Post Desson Thomson
It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don't reach us.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Stone does everything he can to do justice to the real-life people he's depicting, and yet nothing he does can cover up the film's single but overarching weakness: The personal story he uses to portray the larger event is limited in scope and impact.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
World Trade Center is fatally benign -- an unexceptionable and therefore unexceptional heroic narrative that does little to further the tentative creep of our pop culture toward parsing the significance of that catastrophic day.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
I don't question the legitimacy of celebrating the courage of these individuals and their families, and I can even tolerate the hokey nostalgia for World War II epics. But I'm troubled that the filmmakers have elided so much else of what happened on that day, as if it were some kind of neutral backdrop.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
The politics of Stone's 9/11 movie lean right, if they lean any way at all. Mostly, the film sits up straight and just wants to be loved by all. There are more controversial Hallmark cards.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.1 (out of 10) based on 115 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
John F. gave it a10:
Very emotional movie. THe acting was excellent and you never know how it will end until it is over. Great movie.
Radio S. gave it a10:
This film is so absolutely stunning due to the strong bond it creates between protagonists and viewers. I have never seen a movie that is so intensive in the way it shows us some of the great heroes of our days, people that really saved lifes.
Marc M gave it an8:
While i'll admit the move was a little slow at times. It makes up for it with the supererb plotwriting and acting. Great Movie would highly recommend it to people.
James E gave it a1:
Boring. All they did was talk. Slightly upsetting, but otherwise awful.
Jared B. gave it a10:
I absolutely loved this movie! At first, I was a little unsure of this movie, given the fact that these events are still fresh in the minds of many americans. I loved the fact that, instead of focusing on the horror America faced that day, Oliver Stone chose to focus on the courage and brotherhood shared by the two cops at the center of this movie. An excellent movie with great performances, especially by Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena.
Frank D gave it a2:
A colossal disappointment! What has happened to Oliver Stone??? Can this movie (and "Alexander") actually be from the same man who gave us "JFK" (which I consider to be a masterpiece)?
Chah C. gave it a1:
I thought it was very disappointing. The special effects were not good.
