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“World Trade Center”

Directed by Oliver Stone

Paramount Pictures

2 OUT OF 5 STARS

One thing already seems too clear about Hollywood’s versions of Sept. 11: It looks as if they’re going to keep suffering from the same problems plaguing Holocaust movies for decades.

Despite the difference in scale of the two tragedies, these new films are hindered by the same old obstacles. The grave subject matter makes realism the only socially accepted approach, leaving little room for interpretation, and obligates any re-creation of the events to focus on a set standard of themes – the shock, confusion and perhaps even the heroism of the victims, ordinary people faced with an extraordinary situation, and so forth. This filmmaking doesn’t convey anything not already obvious to its audience, and at best produces a successful feature-length memorial.

Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” not only gets bogged down by the weight of its own memorializing, it fails in its execution on several levels. This is surprising because the film is based on a true story almost impossible to botch – the unbelievable rescue of Port Authority policemen John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena, respectively) from the rubble of Ground Zero.

Stone takes this story and replaces its very real and extreme emotions with familiar Hollywood formula. The film’s opening act, which follows Port Authority policemen called down to the World Trade Center, attempts to recreate the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 but feels like a glossy movie every step of the way, complete with agonizing slow-motion shots and an overwrought score.

Once the protagonists become trapped under a collapsed tower, the focus shifts between their struggle to survive on a meticulously crafted movie set and the cliched reactions of their waiting families. Andrea Berloff’s wince-inducing script puts stock dialogue into the mouths of stock characters. Flashback scenes straight from “Lost” abound, though “Lost” has the taste not to mark its flashbacks with the dreamy-bright-light exposure technique.

Only strong acting manages to humanize these scenes: In particular, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal (respectively playing the officers’ wives, Donna McLoughlin and Allison Jimeno) bring a welcome ambiguity to their characters.

Then, as the film reaches its final act – the rescue of the policemen – it inches toward a feel-good moral with a bluntness Paul Haggis or Ron Howard would envy, and tells it to us again with a feel-good Nicolas Cage voice-over to boot.

“World Trade Center” is made with honorable, ambitious intentions, and is far from the outright garbage frequently spit out by studios. Still, it is the worst kind of movie Hollywood can make, because its simplification of such an event into familiar terms asks to be taken seriously. And it will be: Stone’s pedigree and the ability of the actors to sell many scenes means the film will not only score at the box office, but also as meaningful art, thus obscuring its danger as a button-pushing opiate.