This movie should join Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Munich—as well as Hotel Rwanda, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and perhaps El Norte —as required ID for the historically literate American. No drinks without a card. No driver’s license, no graduation party, no nuthin’.
Released just five years from ‘the events of September 11’, the film jolts this viewer with just how easily one slips into a blurred memory of something that might have happened.
It happened, all right. And it matters that it did. The credits remind us that 87 countries lost citizens in what must be remembered as nothing less than blood-curdling mass murder.
The world is indeed at war after 9/11, though this one is far more complex than nationality and creed can capture. It’s a matter of decency versus barbarism.
World Trade Center fixes our gaze on the decency, self-sacrifice, and regular people’s loss that was New York in September, 2001. Not to be forgotten are the world’s tears, as one of Stone’s compelling sequence reminds us in what appears to be real footage of people around the globe absorbing the shock of a news event like no other.
Buy tickets for your whole family. Coddle them, nag them, promise them ice cream after the show, do what it takes to get them to the theater, especially your younger relatives who have begun to believe that things don’t really matter that much and that the world is not at war. They do, and it is.
No movie, no ID, no ticket to life.
Canter Bridge 
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