In fact, you barely see what's going on, which at first seems like a master stroke. The movie assumes we know what happened, so it does not bother to rehash or recreate most of the famous images; in fact, you do not even see the planes hit the towers. Instead, we see the story from ground level, through the eyes and ears of characters who barely know what is happening, who see only the shadow of a plane and hear the blast of an explosion, who don't have time to sit down and watch the news unfold on television while rushing to the rescue and must instead rely on contradictory reports received on cell phones from their loved ones. The feeling of being swept up in something too enormous to grasp is palpable, putting you on the edge of your seat as you almost literally shake with tension.

And then it all falls to pieces. The concourse level of Building 5 collapses, burying McLouglin and Jimon under tons of rubble, and the rest of the film focuses on the two of them - pinned and immobilized - waiting for a rescue that might or might not come, intercut with frequent scenes of their loved ones worrying about them, and occasionally interspersed with flashbacks and/or hallucinations as the imagine re-connecting with their wives or see Jesus offering them a bottle of water.

In effect, the movie (despite being based on the real-life story of McLoughlin and Jimeno) turns into a cliched rerun of 1970s disaster flicks like EARTHQUAKE, in which the titular event strikes early on and the rest of the film is about digging survivors out of the rubble. The idea of having two lead characters who literally cannot move may be an interesting dramatic challenge for the director and the actors (how to keep things interesting when all they can do is talk to each other in the dark?), but it narrows the focus of a major event down to a very tiny slice of a much bigger story. Not that any film could live up to the magnitude of the actual event, but this one avoids even trying to take the bull by the horns.

As a point of comparison, James Cameron retold the fate of the TITANIC by focusing on the fate of two star-crossed lovers, but that did not prevent him from givng us a pretty good idea of what happened to everybody else on the sinking ship. In WORLD TRADE CENTER, on the other hand, the fate of oer 2,700 people who died is reduced to brief subtitle before the closing credits as the movie tries to foist on us a feel-good ending about the two survivors. The result reminds one of Stanely Kubrick's caustic comment about SCHINDLER'S LIST: the holocaust is about 6 million people who died, not about a few hundred who lived.

It is not that the story of two survivors is not worth telling; however, that story is only a part of what happened, and any film that calls itself WORLD TRADE CENTER - a rather broad title - should be about what happened at the Trade Center on a large scale. The McLouglin-Jimeno elemtn is a subplot that should have received at most one-fourth the screen time. There is just too much about September 11 that is left unsaid for this film to be considered a success.

WOLRD TRADE CENTER should have been a multi-character story, emphasizing the historical context, and it should have provided some kind of catharsis in its attempt to come to terms with the enormity of the event. What we get instead is actually very well made and even occasionally moving. But it's just not enough.

TRIVIA

Because the time-frame of the story is limited almost exclusively to the rescue operation (which was well before anybody knew who was responsble for the attacks), there is no mention of Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden. This lapse leads to a a misleading implication: One important supporting character is a marine who re-enlists, proclaiming that "we're at war" and that somebody needs to "avenge this." Just before the end credits, a subtitle tells us that this sargeant served two tours of duty -- IN IRAQ. Nothing in the movie points out the obvious irony: the man who wanted to fight the enemies who attacked the U.S. on September 11 instead ended up in a country that had nothing to do with the attacks or with Al Qaeda or with Osama Bin Laden. This may be simply an oversight, but it does play into the thoroughly debunked Republican/White House talking point (promulgated by Vice President Dick Cheney, among others) that Iraq was somehow involved in the September 11 plot.

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