LOS ANGELES: Two Hollywood movies that asked US audiences to live through the September 11, 2001 attacks again on theatre screens proved wounds from the tragedy were still tender across the country.
British director Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” weren’t the first or only Hollywood treatments of the disaster five years ago — a number of television movies and documentaries have been shown.
But the two were the first feature films to show across the nation in movie houses, testing the country’s readiness to relive the deadly attacks even as
their consequences are still filtering through Americans’ daily lives.
The response was tentative at best, especially with “World Trade Center”, which opened in hyper-sensitive New York City on August 9 to both praise and savage and tearful criticism at its daring, melodramatic evocation of the attacks that were still fresh for many of the city’s residents.
“It’s always going to be too soon for somebody,” Hollywood director and producer Melissa Balin said.
“I think that with any major tragedy, there is a full range of post-traumatic stress and the varying stages of grieving.
“Which means that you are going to have factions of people that will find it cathartic to see a movie and cry out their emotions, and others that are going to be angry and resentful at the thought of trying to recreate such painful memories.”
Released in April, “United 93” was a fictitious but nevertheless scrupulous depiction of one of the four airplanes hijacked by Al Qaeda operatives, the only flight that failed to hit its target.
The flight crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers rose up to battle the hijackers, some of them having told relatives by cellphone of their plan.
“United 93” only showed one drama of the September 11 attacks, however.
Stone, one of Hollywood’s most politically controversial directors — he made the conspiratorial 1991 film “JFK” — ambitiously took on the most horrifying event of the day, the crash of two planes into the World Trade Center towers which then collapsed, killing more than 2,700 people.
Starring Nicolas Cage, the film depicts the true story of two policemen who were miraculously pulled alive from the rubble of the twin towers.
Both films earned good reviews — “United 93” especially — but audiences were lukewarm when it came to buying tickets and watching them.
Greengrass’s film took in 31.4 million dollars in North America on a modest cost of 15 million. Stone spent some 60 million dollars on “World Trade Center”, but has earned back at the box office slightly more than 48 million, according to the website Boxofficemojo.com.
The big question posed by both films was whether Hollywood had rushed ahead before Americans were ready to be reminded on their weekend movie outings of the worst terrorist attacks ever on US soil.
It wasn’t the first time that Hollywood pushed the envelope with film re-enactments of sensitive topics.
Francis Ford Coppola’s disturbing “Apocalypse Now” came out in 1979, when the wounds from the only recently ended Vietnam War were still deep across the United States.
Alan Pakula made “All the President’s Men”, about the investigation that forced the resignation of president Richard Nixon, only two years after Nixon left office in 1974.
“The examination by a filmmaker of a real-life tragedy, I believe, is as proper as an author writing a book about the tragedy and examining the details,” said movie industry expert and lawyer Jay Cooper.—AFP
