Well, Roeper gave Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" four stars, so I just had to go check it out. I wasn't expecting a hardcore disaster movie showing 4,700 people getting crushed and burned alive; the entire topic of 9/11 is too taboo for a movie to be that honest. But what I didn't expect was this long, drawn out, boring reworking of the movie "Ladder 49." First of all, I hardly cared about the two main characters, port authority policemen trapped in the rubble, because the movie told me nothing about their lives prior to the buildings falling on their heads within twenty minutes of the opening credit. My brain was washed with more depressing musical scores than it was enlightened by storytelling. What I got handed was over two hours of back and forth shots of two men covered in ashes moaning and groaning and their families at home worrying about them. And where was Oliver Stone? Since when does Oliver Stone create such war propaganda as this? For example, one of the heroes, an ex-marine who gets a message from God to go to New York and look for bodies under the rubble, and who eventually finds and helps save Nicholas Cage, quits his job at the end of the movie to join back up with the Marines to "avenge" the hijackings, and then a caption at the end of the movie says he went on to serve two terms in Iraq. So he went to avenge the bin-Laden attacks by killing Iraqi people? Does that make any sense to you? The misconception that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 is pure Bush propaganda and nothing in this movie helped to clear such Bush-isms up. I'm very disappointed in Stone, who created such politically provocative movies as Natural Born Killers and Nixon. He had the chance to create something honest and he sold out. His new movie is not like "United 93," which tells the story of 9/11 very objectively, playing out the incidents without making any political comments about it, thus creating one of the scariest movies I've seen in a long time. Instead, "World Trade Center" feeds on its audience's emotions in a cheap Hollywood way, and refers to the perpetrators of the attacks only as "those bastards." Certainly the hijackers were bastards, but if Stone was going to comment in this way, maybe he should have also touched upon WHY those bastards hated America so much that they pulled off a thing like this. Once again the thousands of citizens who died in the towers were forgotten in order to tell the story of two policemen. If you saw the CBS documentary with actual footage of some of the firemen who went into the towers, you've already seen this film so don't bother. Maybe some day we'll actually get a movie that tells the story of what it was like to be in the World Trade Center on that day, a story more reminiscent of the 70s disaster epic "The Towering Infernal" than this tear-jerker. In order to actually understand the politics of 9/11, we would need to be shown the greed of some of those working in the World Trade Center, the suffering that American sanctions have caused Middle Eastern countries, the twisted, fanaticism of terrorist organizations, the corruption of the Bush regime, as well as the story of the simple, innocent folks like the elevator operators who also died there. The moral of this movie was shoved down my throat: that in times of crisis, the American people discover their humanity and help each other out. To me, this moral brings up a good question. Why don't we act humane all of the time? Why do we only come together to help each other when something as tragic as 9/11 occurs? If we could be honest enough with ourselves to answer such a question, we might be able to avoid future 9/11s. But as it is, I found no honesty in this slow-moving, dull, predictable, unoriginal view with the blinders on. It was just another one-sided call to arms against the enemy, any enemy, no matter if they are guilty.