01. Despite what the trailers would have you believe, it was not nearly as cheesy as I feared it would be. Everything that was really awful in the trailer was actually taken ridiculously out of context. For example, there’s that part where Nicolas Cage’s character says to the other dude “Can you still see the light?” and in the trailer they make it look like he’s almost having a religious experience and the light is this huge big metaphor. Whereas yes, it’s still obviously a metaphor in the film itself, but the context in which he says it is less one of piety or reverance than it is a moment of survival and assessing the situation. I should really trust Oliver Stone more. That trailer really did a number on me because I’m not sure why I ever thought he was capable of making something truly schlocky.
02. That being said, there were a lot of cheesy moments, most of which could have been avoided simply by using a different camera effect. There were too many flashback scenes drowned in light, figures glowing, and while I understand that obviously these are standard visual cues to tell the audience “HEY! BACK THEN IT WAS THE GOLDEN ERA? SEE THE HALOS AROUND THESE PEOPLE?” I just can’t stand that sort of thing. What was worse was the excessive use of soft-focus in the regular time line. Maria Bello is watching TV and trying to look anguished; is there a reason everything outside of a five inch square of face looks like someone got a little too excited with the Smart Blur filter in Photoshop?
03. I found it surprisingly boring. I can’t pinpoint why.
04. If you see this film at all for any reason, it should be to witness the following: the glowing Jesus hallucination complete with the sacred bleedin’ heart and … a water bottle. No, really. I’m not fucking with you here. Jesus shows up not once but twice to bring hope to the people trapped in the rubble. Uh huh. At no point in the movie did I cry, but when we left the theatre I burst into hysterical tears about the glowing Jesus because I thought it was that funny. It was just so ridiculous. It was like Stone took some old footage from the cutting room floor of The Doors when Jim Morrison is running around the desert on peyote, and then spliced it into this film. Bizarre is what it is.
05. The other really awesome part of the film was the character Karnes. The guy is at work and sees all the footage on television and randomly says to the room at large “We’re at war.” He goes to church to pray for a bit and it basically turns out that he’s gotten a call from God to go and help the people at Ground Zero. He goes down to the barbershop, gets his head shaved, puts on his old Marines uniform and heads down to start helping people. He was that stereotypical crazy-intense, hardcore, devoutly Christian army guy you see in movies all the time and he was fan-freaking-tastic. One of the cops asked him his name and he said “Staff Sergeant Karnes.” The cop said “You got a shorter name?” and he replied “Staff Sergeant.” BAKLJASDLKJ! WIN.
06. I don’t know exactly why it was critical for Maria Bello’s character to have blue eyes, but I found her coloured contacts really disconcerting. Maybe it’s because her pupils always looked incredibly dilated.
07. The prize for most unnecessary subtitles in a film go to World Trade Center for finding the need to flash “September 11, 2001″ across the screen at the beginning, as if anyone viewing the film WOULD NOT KNOW WHAT DAY IT WAS TAKING PLACE ON. Jesus, how stupid do they think we are?
Overall I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, but I’m not sure that’s saying much considering I went in there thinking I’d hate it. In the end, I’m not sure what the point of the movie was because it doesn’t really end up saying much of anything beyond “Hey, people helping people can be a beautiful thing.” Which everyone already knows because they lived through it the first time. *shrug* I’d basically recommend it only for the Jesus thing.