So far, the upcoming Oliver Stone film WORLD TRADE CENTER, which is scheduled to open next week, is earning high praise from critics (e.g., an 83% approval rating based on the first six reviews surveyed at Rotten Tomatoes), but I have to wonder whether they are responding to the film or to the memories to evokes. There may be -- in fact, probably is -- a great movie to be made about this tragic, historical event, but this ain't it.

The film is a bit far afield of what we usually cover here, but since it deals with real-life horrors, I'll stretch a point to discuss where it went wrong. In a nutshell, the title is misleading. This is not a film about the World Trade Center; it's a film about two guys trapped in the rubble. It should have been called PAPD (for Port Authority Police Department).

The movie gets off to a good start, showing the daily routine of Port Authority veteran John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and rookie Will Jimeno(Michael Pena) as they go to work on September 11, 2001. The film literally doesn't have to do anything to build suspsense, because our knowledge of the disaster to come is more than enough, and Stone (working from a script by Andrea Berloff) wisely lets the events unfold with a minimum of forshadowing and avoids tastelessly exploiting the opportunity for onscreen mayhem when the planes hit.

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.

I mean, 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. In WORLD TRADE CENTER, on the other hand, the fate of nearly 3,000 people who died is reduced to brief subtitle before the closing credits as the movie tries to force a feel-good, upbeat ending about the two survivors. The result reminds me 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's not that I don't think the story of two survivors is worth telling, but it's 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 story is a subplot that should have received one-fourth the screen time. There is just too much left unsaid for this film to be considered a success.

A few years back, a friend of mine, Anthony Montesano, and I were discussing how Hollywood would ever broach this (at the time) taboo subject. He suggested the film should follow the ordinary lives of unsuspecting people as they went to work that day; I assumed the structure would be a multi-character one that allowed us to see the event from several different points of view. I suspected the result would be something like the film version of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (starring Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, and Deborah Kerr) in which the drama of character's lives is so interesting that you are sucked into the story without realizing that it's all heading toward the fateful date of the Pearl Harbor attack. (Even on second viewing, it seema a shock when Lancaster, during a phone call, leans up against a wall calendar showing the date of December 6, and we suddenly realize what's going to be happening to him and everyone else the next morning).

That's the kind of film that WOLRD TRADE CENTER should have been. What we get instead is actually very well made and even occasionally moving. But it's just not enough.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention one thing about the film's limited focus that leads to a horrible misrepresentation of reality. 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.

That might be forgivable as a piece of dramatic license, but...

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 --with no trace of irony -- that this sargeant served two tours of duty -- IN IRAQ.

That's right: the guy who wanted to fight a war against the enemies who attacked the U.S. on September 11 instead ended up in Iraq -- a country that had nothing to do with the attacks or with Al Qaeda or with Osama Bin Laden.

And the film just presents this fact without comment, as if it made some kind of sense.

Well, it doesn't. It's stupid and ignorant. Someone who didn't know any better could leave the film thinking that Iraq was responsible for the attacks - a rumor perpetuated by Dick Cheney and right-wing pundits despite being thoroughly debunked.

I would have expected Oliver Stone to make a more courageous film, one that did not play it safe by avoiding well-justified criticism of the adminstration's response to September 11 (the fact that George Bush went pretty much AWOL for the day is glossed over as well). I guess that would have been too negative for the feel-good happy ending approach the film took.