I went out to see World Trade Center this past week. Cinema Center, of course. Overall it was pretty good, but I thought a lot of the dialogue was campy. And frankly, Oliver Stone’s “one plane theory” was pretty ridiculous. The part where he kept showing the south tower sway “back, and to the left … back, and to the left” was a bit much. Apparently, I’m not the only one who felt this way, as the movie’s opening week was unable to usurp Will Ferrell’s latest, Talladega Nights.

If you don’t already know, the movie follows the story of three Port Authority police officers who get trapped in the collapse while attempting to evacuate the towers. Since it’s only a component of a story and not the climax or story itself, the collapse happens within the first ten minutes of the movie. If you’re in a theater that actually has a respectable sound system (Cinema Center) and not just a loud sound system (Regal), you’ll be able to enjoy the subharmonics of a 110-story building crashing down.

One of the most disturbing elements of the movie was the use of the actual emergency communications audio throughout the early scenes. Anyone who’s heard the 9/11 recordings will recognize the voice of the first FDNY dispatcher. Those tapes are haunting in their own right; incorporating them with the re-created footage of emergency responders rushing through the city really presents a powerful image, especially when coupled with the realization that everything you’re hearing is real, and everything you’re seeing is firmly grounded in reality.

The movie was slightly disappointing because although they refrained from sensationalizing the event and from focusing on material irrelevant to the story, they did resort to a lot of cheesiness. There’s a lot of zooming in on smug smiles, a lot of “inspirational” lines, and a lot of just plain bad dialogue. “Maybe that smoke is a curtain God put up to shield us from what we’re not ready to see”? Come on.
Some of the dialogue, on the other hand, is well-done. The officers are under the impression that they’re under a few feet of rubble and that only the concourse collapsed. They don’t know that both towers had collapsed. In addition, the movie does a good job at contrasting the occupied, everyday, normal life of the building — even during the minutes prior to collapse — with the desolation and rubble of the aftermath.

All in all, the movie was worthwhile. Go see it. Swallow the cheesiness. Then come home and read Vanity Fair’s article on the recently-released NORAD recordings & transcripts from that day:

08:46:36 NASYPANY: Hi, sir. O.K., what—what we’re doing, we’re tryin’ to locate this guy. We can’t find him via I.F.F. [the Identification Friend or Foe system]. What we’re gonna do, we’re gonna hit up every track within a 25-mile radius of this Z-point [coordinate] that we put on the scope. Twenty-nine thousand [feet] heading 1-9-0 [east]. We’re just gonna do—we’re gonna try to find this guy. They can’t find him. There’s supposedly been threats to the cockpit. So we’re just doing the thing … [off-mic conversation] True. And probably right now with what’s going on in the cockpit it’s probably really crazy. So, it probably needs to—that will simmer down and we’ll probably get some better information.

American 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center four seconds into this transmission.