Written by: Susan Granger
SusanGranger.com

Intense yet respectful, this disaster film is based on the intimate, real-life accounts of two heroic Port Authority cops who were rtapped in the rubble on September 11, 2001.

Nicolas Cage plays Sgt. John McLoughlin, who commandeered a city bus to lead a contingent of volunteers from the Port Authority bus terminal to lower Manhattan, entering the WTC’s concourse when the first tower started collapsing above them.

“Run to elevator shaft,” he yelled, realizing that was the strongest part of the building. Three officers made it, although one of them, Dominick Pezzula (Jay Hernandez), subsequently died.

McLoughlin and rookie Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), wedged beneath slabs of twisted metal and crumbled blocks of concrete, were buried in the wreckage of the twin towers some 20 feet below the ground. They couldn’t see one another but they could hear each other. Grimly determined, they kept each other awake in the smoky semi-darkness.

Written by Andrea Berloff and directed by Oliver Stone, the visceral, manipulative structure repetitiously juxtaposes the helpless men’s desperate attempts to stay alive with the poignant reactions of their agonized families, particularly their wives (Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Less is revealed about other first responders, like David Karnes (Michael Shannon), a Wilton, Connecticut, accountant who donned his old Marine uniform, stopped at a barbershop for a buzzcut, then drove to Ground Zero and launched his own rescue mission. He and another Marine found McLoughlin and Jimeno, making them the 18th and 19th of just 20 survivors pulled from the debris.

There’s no conspiracy theory, no political diatribe, just a meticulously crafted, well-acted tribute to courage in the face of catastrophe.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, World Trade Center is a life-affirming, somber 7, marking the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attack.