Ever since whatever happened on September 11 2001, people often asked each other what did they do on that day. From then on, it became one of those dates where it naturally entered the history books like the time when the Berlin Wall fell.
But back to the movie. Based on real-life accounts of New York Port Authority Police Department's Sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and his colleague, rookie cop William Jimeno (Michael Pena), the movie brings us back to the day which eventually changed the history of the 21st century since.
It started as just another day in the lives of these two men and their other colleagues at the Port Authority Police Department. They all went about doing their work till they received news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Some sounded sceptism at first, but whatever happened on at the streets of New York City later led to the men thinking that this was something big. McLoughlin and his team of volunteers entered one of the two towers. When the building finally collapsed, it was too late.
They were being trapped under 20 feet of steel and concrete and, silence.
Above ground, the country and the rest of the world (from Africa to Europe to the Asian continents, as being shown in the movie) started to comprehend what really happened. This even included McLoughlin's wife Donna (Maria Bello) and Jimeno's pregnant wife Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Allison was especially hysterical, given her conditions. It was quite a terrible ordeal for the two of them when they learnt that their husbands were among those reportedly unaccounted for.
Inside the rubbles, the two men kept themselves alive by chatting with each other about their lives and exchanging Starsky and Hutch trivia. They never knew that above the ground, ex-Marine David Karnes (Michael Shannon) was determined to find if anyone was still alive below the rubbles.
Criss-crossing various groups of people who all came together on the fateful day, director Olivier Stone paid tribute to those who survived and those who were among the 2,759 perished. McLoughlin and Jimeno were among the 20 who were being rescued alive from the World Trade Center's rubbles.
If one had noticed, the replica of Ground Zero just looked so real that it is just like the real thing. It was specially created to give the raw feel of the rubbles. And I am also lucky to sit through the entire movie over the weekend at the cinema given some of the scenes are just, painful to watch.
Emotion and humane and courage, this is what the movie is just trying to do.
Rating: 3.5/5
