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9/11 film wins acclaim
31/07/2006 09:40 - (SA)
Los Angeles - Ten days before the box office debut of World Trade Center, critics already are heaping extravagant praise on Oliver Stone's new film about the September 11 attacks.
The rave reviews are all the more striking as many critics had doubted the controversial director, known for his often heavy-handed story telling and penchant for conspiracy theories, could handle such a sensitive subject.
Opening on August 9 in North America, a month before the fifth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, the full-length film with Nicolas Cage in the main role tells the true story of two police officers trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers in New York.
"It's an exploration of heroism in our country - but is international at the same time in its humanity," Stone said a year ago when the project was announced by Paramount Pictures.
The director said the screenplay was "a work of collective passion, a serious meditation on what happened, and carries within a compassion that heals".
Stone, 59, who has won three Oscars including best director for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, has been criticised over the years for a lack of nuance that has coloured much of his work, such as the ultra-violent Natural Born Killers.
"He's considered as a very good filmmaker, but somebody who has an agenda and somebody who tends to hit you over the head with a hammer," said critic Lew Harris, editor of the website Movies.com, noting that Stone is also known for his fixation with "conspiracy theories".
Avoids pitfalls
But Harris, among a group of critics who were given a special screening of the film before its public premier, told AFP World Trade Center avoids the pitfalls that have plagued some of Stone's previous efforts.
"Oliver Stone has made a very heroic movie. He makes a real play with your emotions," Harris said.
"He gets the most subtle performance out of Nicolas Cage I've ever seen," according to Harris. "For half the movie Nicolas Cage is buried in rubble and can barely speak because he's haemorrhaging, and all you really see is his eyes. It's a remarkable performance, an Oscar performance."
For Harris, World Trade Center could be one of the greatest films ever made and other critics have already suggested it should be a top contender for an Oscar as the best film of the year.
Roger Friedman at Fox News, a broadcast network that usually treats left-of-centre figures such as Stone with scepticism, also spoke in reverential tones about the film.
"Stone has made an elegant, powerful, moving and genuinely personal document," Friedman said.
Stone took a tremendous gamble in taking on such loaded subject matter, according to critic David Poland.
"The tightrope on this movie was incredibly thin. Falling was more a promise than a question," Poland wrote in an online review. "But much to my delight, Stone and Co walk it just about perfectly."
- AFP
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South Africa
