With a first time screenwriter, Andrea Berloff, telling the true story of two our of twenty post-collapse rescued survivors, members of New York's Bravest who went into the Towers to evacuate citizens, the story is not so much a great yarn as a simple framework for evoking great and noble emotions. I'll admit that I was a mess during most of the movie, whenever the common goodness of people came through, the remarkable courage and kindness we tend to associate with stories of "The Greatest Generation", a.k.a. those American soldiers and supporters in World War II.
It's been said by critics that for better or worse (depending on the critic), Stone has gone aesthetically conservative with this picture, but I think that's a misreading. What he's done is to take his considerable shot vocabulary and put it in service of a classic Hollywood structure, one that would not have been out of place made by John Ford in the 1940's, where it's all put together in a more seamless fashion than we might be used to from Stone.
The bravura shots are there, though, from the orchestral overture of the New York City beginning a typical Monday, to the subjective POV of the disaster (mitigating the stifling task of showing everything from some sort of definitive angle), to the triumphant rescues owing it all to pure altruistic human effort.
I am also impressed how Stone, a Hollywood Liberal if not radical, doesn't shy away from the more religious/vengeful attitude of Dave Karnes, the Marine who heard the calling from Wisconsin and came army-of-one style to the rescue. For what a movie with something of an ameliorating mission (it's about survivors, not the doomed as in United 93), for the filmmakers to allow some true-life Christ-worship and anger into the movie is admirable.
There's a brief scene with El Presidente's first post-attack address to the television cameras (how young he looks compared to now!) and while Stone doesn't mock him, there is the news anchor saying he's flying to an undisclosed location and, moreover, that sense of all we lost since that day.
I remember certain folks thanking the heavens that a Republican was in the White House that day, since they seem so much more the "War Party" than the Dems. I wonder what those same folks would say today. I used the word "squandered" in the first paragraph and there isn't one better to describe how horribly this profligate rich kid has wasted all the emotional, political, human capital we had that day and due to our heroic response to the immediate crisis.
As the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq approaches the number of citizens killed on 9/11/2001, more if you include the wounded who died back stateside, as the number of innocent Iraqi citizens who have died due to our invasion mounts many times over, this movie feels like a sharp-edged period piece, wrapped in deceptively emotional gauze.
One can only hope that Stone's legitimacy is heightened in all corners by this effort, and that he's reloading his guns for the battles ahead.
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