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World Trade Center
Paramount Pictures


5.0

based on 40 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 110 votes
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FILM:

TV:

The Path To 9/11

MPAA 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)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Andrea Berloff John McLoughlin. Donna McLoughlin, William Jimeno and Allison Jimeno (true story)
DIRECTED BY:	Oliver Stone
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: December 12, 2006 Theatrical: August 9, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	129 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

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.

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.

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.

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The strong personalities of Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who play typical supportive wives, keep scenes from sagging.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It's as harrowing as moviegoing gets.

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."

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.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

At its best it shares with Stone's finest work a feeling for the imminence of death and salvation.

The New Yorker David Denby

This square movie, at its best, is very powerful.

Empire Ian Nathan

Even without his box of political tricks, Oliver Stone remains the foremost cinematic shrink for America's distress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Where "United 93" was a superb example of masterful storytelling, World Trade Center is a more conventional rendering.

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.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Undeniably affecting, but you leave it wanting more.

Variety Brian Lowry

World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Almost unforgivably sentimental.

The average user rating for this movie is 5.0 (out of 10) based on 110 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

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.

Mark B. gave it a7:
This may not be the most tasteful analogy in the world, but just as 1965 saw a cultural division between "Beatles people" and "Rolling Stones people", and 1994 featured a similar rift between "Pulp Fiction people" and "Forrest Gump people", so will 2006 come to be known as the year in which the "United 93 people" and the "World Trade Center" people squared off. For the record, count me in the former camp: Paul Greengrass's semidocumentary, semi-fly-on-the-wall reenactment of one aspect of 9/11 was a brilliantly executed (if necessarily harrowing and somewhat depressing) one-of-a-kind masterpiece, while Oliver Stone's interpretation of another is a really, really good made-for-TV movie. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and the universe is certainly big enough to hold both approaches, but you've got to either credit or criticize Stone for pulling off the daunting task of transforming a national, history-changing tragedy into a film that's second only to Akeelah and the Bee as THE feel-good film of 2006! Stone accomplishes this by focusing on two New York cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) who were pinned under tons of brick, stone and metal awaiting either death or rescue; since falling asleep could very conceivably doom them, each had to keep the other awake, and surprisingly, their very different personalities and temperaments helped considerably: the extremely talkative Jimeno wouldn't LET McLoughlin drift off, while McLoughlin was so taciturn that Jimeno had to take special care on frequent occasions that he was still conscious. Cage is solid, Pena remarkably good, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary, Sherrybaby) and Maria Bello (Flicka, A History of Violence) are such strong actresses that they make the standard Wives Who Wait roles that you've seen hundreds of times before seem remarkably new. Much has been said about Oliver Stone's body of work, and while this is certainly atypical in many ways, it also lines up with a common thread to most of his films that isn't often discussed: from Platoon and Wall Street (with their warring good and bad father figures) to the underrated epic Alexander, they're often such effective studies in the qualities of leadership that they could be excerpted and shown in management seminars. (Even Snoop Dogg has commented that you can watch the Stone-scripted Scarface to learn what Tony Montana did both right and wrong...and who are we to argue with Snoop?) Because of Stone's (partially self-created) reputation as a controversial leftist provocateur, his announced (and almost completely successful) intention to make World Trade Center a totally apolitical film has truly earned him some strange bedfellows: left-of-center website film critic MaryAnn Johansen ("The Flick Filosopher") quite unjustly lists this as second to the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie as the worst of 2006 thus far, while right-wing columnists Cal Thomas and Michael Medved have sung the film's praises to the heavens. Break out the galoshes and heavy-weather gear, folks: hell has frozen over at last!

Anna K gave it a10:
It showed the actual feeling of the captured people inside of the twin towers. Highly Recomended.

Markus G. gave it a9:
A deeply touching, slowly evolving must-see for everyone who ever thought of giving up hope. People who weren't touched by this film have a rock where others have a heart. Highly recommended.

Ken G. gave it a5:
I realize there are those who think that to dislike a movie like this (that celebrates the heroes of 9/11) is almost "un-American", but those people can go away as far as I'm concerned. A poorly made movie is a poorly made movie, regardless of the subject matter. Unlike "United 93" (one of the year's best movies) which was told in a very matter-of-fact manner, "World Trade Center" is busting at the seams with reverence for what it is doing, and thus comes off as somewhat ponderous, and also somewhat full of itself. It also has some bad dialogue, and some moments that come off more corny then poignant (which considering the subject matter, was probably actually kind of hard to do) there is also something really generic about this. Much of movie focuses on Cage and the other guy trapped in the rubble. But this feels like a lot of other movies we've had about people trapped in cave-ins. Then you had the very familiar, formula scenes of their families standing by anxiously waiting for word, which could have been taken out of a lot of movies. And the flashbacks also could have been taken out of a lot of movies. Bottom line is that this film never captures the scope of the unbearable tragedy of that day, or the overwhelming poignancy.

World Trade Center Paramount Pictures

World Trade Center
Paramount Pictures