Rosenbaum on "World Trade Center"

At The Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum weighs in on World Trade Center:

“THE HOLOCAUST IS ABOUT six million people who get killed,” Stanley Kubrick reportedly said to screenwriter Frederic Raphael in the late 90s. “Schindler’s List was about 600 people who don’t.” Assuming the quote is right, Kubrick’s speaking about the Holocaust in the present tense and about a movie made half a century later in the past tense suggests something about his priorities.

They probably aren’t the priorities of Oliver Stone, whose ruthlessly circumscribed World Trade Center isn’t about the 2,749 citizens of 87 countries who got killed in the 9/11 assault on the Twin Towers and who are mentioned only in a title when the movie’s over. It’s about two citizens of one of those countries who survived, John McLoughlin and William Jimeno, both real-life Port Authority policemen. The story of what they experienced is gripping and inspiring, but however true it is to their lives—it’s hard to imagine any two men on the planet could be as conventional as the filmmakers make these heroes—the way it’s told restricts what the movie can say about the larger tragedy. … “