It’s kinda hard to make bad comments about this movie because, since it is so respectful about its subject matter, you end up feeling like you’re being disrespectful to the real victims and survivors if you get even slightly negative on it. So I apologise if anything I write here comes off that way – I hope I don’t need to say this, but this is the internet afterall, and I assure you it’s not intended that way.

I wanted and expected this movie to make me cry a lot, and I did cry a lot in places. But when I think about it, those tears were nothing to do with the filmmaking before me. Any movie featuring those towers crashing down would do this to me. This movie comes over incredibly authentic but it’s kinda a little too careful about it for its own good if it wants to be a movie that’ll last.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is fantastic, though – I’m now convinced this is gonna be her year for Oscar either supporting for this or leading for Sherrybaby – and the technical elements are exactly as they should be in an Oliver Stone movie, though Craig Armstrong’s score is a little too simple for my liking. Stone, too, is to be commended for staying out of the way more than he ever has before in terms of commentary on the events he’s portraying. It was for that reason I was till now predicting him and the movie itself for big wins at the Oscars. But in the end, this movie is really just a fine melodramatic reconstruction – nowhere near as deep as United 93, and really nowhere near powerful enough to bear the title it bears.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 3:31 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.