World Trade Center: directed by Oliver Stone and Starring Nicolas Cage Summary: The movie was essentially: We’re cops. Oh @#$% we’re trapped! Hooray, a marine! And, the occasional “Where’s my husband?” Details: I was in the mood for some pathos, but from a source that wouldn’t leave me depressed for days. I figured World Trade Center would follow Nicolas Cage, who plays a Port Authority Police officer, as the WTC was hit, he would encounter some unexpected difficulty in his attempts to rescue people, and ultimately prevail over it. And while technically that’s exactly what happens, I was also expecting something of a typical story arc along the way. Instead, we have a few minutes of establishing shots in which we learn that he gets up early, has a lot of kids, and is generally looked up to at work. The WTC is hit, he grabs some men and starts foraging for the air tanks they’ll need, and then the building falls down on him. From that point until about two minutes from the end we can only see his face poking out of the rubble. He’s twenty feet below the debris, and two of his fellow officers have survived, although one dies pretty quickly. The other one, who we can actually see a whole head and arms on keeps him company, when not hallucinating jesus with a water bottle. They chat about nothing in particular just to keep each other from falling asleep, and we have flashbacks of totally mundane life events interspersed with shots of their wives and families being generally upset that no-one knows what happened to their men. Somewhere along the way an ex-marine is watching on TV in his office, says something to the effect of “You may not know it, but we’re at war now” goes off, gets a military haircut, and spends the night looking through the rubble for survivors even though they’ve called it off until morning. Our survivors are found, dug out, wives cry, the movie ends. Nobody overcomes anything, beyond not dying for over 24 hrs with internal bleeding. <sarcasm>Obviously, I was terribly moved by this. </sarcasm>