One should not judge a book by its cover nor a movie by its previews. Still, some covers and coming attractions make you not want to plunk down your bucks and the trailer for the new Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center, sure doesn't send me logging over to Fandango to reserve tickets.
Almost everyone praised United 93 for not "exploiting" its subject matter. In fact, I think some folks went overboard with that notion. The movie was made to generate a profit, after all. I don't think that's ignoble, especially if it's as honest a film as some say it is…but a production of that size and scope does not get made without someone figuring it'll wind up in the black.
Based largely on the trailer — and a little on Stone's track record — I'll predict that World Trade Center will be scorned as everything they said United 93 wasn't: Exploitive, sensational and manipulative in a non-organic way. If you watch the preview, see if you don't have the same reaction I did. As soon as I saw Nicolas Cage in the mustache playing what looks like a police officer (actually, a Port Authority Officer), I thought: The focus is on a star. That's wrong. Cage is a pretty good actor but 9/11 was not about one guy at the center of things, and that's how they're selling it.
I gather the film is about Cage's character and one other man getting trapped under rubble and fighting to survive. Not to cast any negatives at all on the real-life men who were in that predicament…but as a movie, there's a basic problem with depicting something like that. The advance publicity and simple history tell us in advance that the two men eventually got out alive. Okay, so how is an audience supposed to react to that? We watch them fight to survive for two hours knowing that they'll turn out to have been luckier than most? We cheer at the end when they're rescued because, though thousands died, thank God Nicholas Cage made it out? Might it not somehow trivialize the deaths of 9/11 to zero in on one story of survival when the real story was how many did not?
As you'll see if you click to watch, near the end of the trailer, it says "The world saw evil that day." I can already hear TV reviewers cite that and add, "But it won't see World Trade Center." Not unless this is a very different movie than its advertising suggests.
By the way, larger and higher-resolution clips of this trailer may be viewed at this website. You can also skip it altogether and go watch this footage of a monkey washing a cat.
