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PLOT: Two Port Authority police officers take shelter in an elevator shaft when the Twin Towers fall, and survive, horribly injured, to await a rescue that might never come.
If you can find me just one psychic who predicted that Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie would be his least controversial movie ever, then I'll hand in my Skeptics' Society membership.
But that's the skinny on Stone's film World Trade Center.
It's a straightforward rescue drama about two cops who managed to survive being trapped underneath the rubble of two 110-storey buildings -- the kind of thing that Reader's Digest eats up for its heartwarming Drama In Real Life features.
No wonder the movie, with its inspiring portrayal of emergency first-response professionals, swelling strings and even a visitation from Jesus Himself, has elicited the ironic blessing of conservative groups in the U.S., people who would just as soon have flogged him in the public square for JFK and Platoon.
No conspiracy theories here, no Bush-bashing, no claims of high-level criminal negligence.
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Instead, World Trade Center scrupulously sticks to one event -- and spends so much time in cramped ruins with two protagonists who can't even move, it could just as easily be a movie about a mine cave-in.
Indeed, the events we associate with the movie's title happen in the first 20 minutes or so. As it opens, we see Port Authority Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) get out of bed at his Jersey home without even looking at his wife Donna (Maria Bello) -- a portent for the lethargy in their marriage that emerges later when we get inside McLoughlin's concussed head.
Soon, we're in the station house, where initial news reports of the events at the WTC are being greeted with skepticism ("That's no private plane!").
And soon after that, McLoughlin is leading the PAPD first-response team into the concourse between the still-standing towers, to organize an evacuation.
And then it happens, and McLoughlin and a rookie named Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) are left clinging to life.
The reality of their survival is mind-boggling (a third PAPD officer, played by Jay Hernandez, survived the initial collapse of Tower Two but was killed when Tower One followed suit).
The cinematic reality of it is that World Trade Center relies greatly on "face-acting," an assignment both Cage and Pena perform admirably -- though Cage's "Nyawk" accent is in-and-out.
The wives, played respectively by Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, have compelling subplots which they make the most of.
And the real-life side characters are so colourful that test audiences have complained they're caricatures. For instance, Dave Karnes (played with hilarious brittleness by Michael Shannon), a gung ho Marine-turned-minister who gives up his calling on the spot to re-up, joins the rescue effort and ends up discovering McLoughlin and Jimeno.
It makes for a pretty seamless portrayal of lives in peril and loved ones in turmoil -- all of which has as little or as much to do with Sept. 11 as you want it to.
Bottom line: You may be relieved or disappointed, but Oliver Stone avoids the messy 9/11 detritus, conspiracy theories, conjecture, etc. This is such a focused story -- one with a happy ending no less -- that it could as easily be about surviving a mine cave-in. At that, it's an affecting tale about the bonds between family, spouses and friends, and the will to survive.
(This film is rated PG)