WORLD TRADE CENTER (B+/A-)
Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maria Bello, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Oliver Stone.

United 93 was better. There, I said it. And were it not for the subject matter, that fact would be immaterial to my review, because the phrase “United 93 was better” happens to be true of every film I’ve seen in the last two years. But World Trade Center inevitably invites comparisons to the prior film, which was the first big-screen effort to dramatize the events of 9/11and did so with gut-wrenching perfection. So there it is; United 93 was better. Now I can free myself to give you a number of reasons why World Trade Center is a very, very good film.

Reason number one: the restrained skill with which Oliver Stone directs the scenes of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) buried under the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center. Shrouded in darkness, there are only close-up shots of Cage and Peña and the cacophonous sounds around them at Stone’s disposal, but he uses them simply and effectively. In one of these scenes, John and Will pray and scream more and more loudly as the debris violently shifts, as if they’re trying to drown out the chaos.

He uses dramatic flourishes sparingly. One of those is a hallucination of Jesus Christ holding a bottle of water. I was aware of this scene before seeing the film, and I dreaded it, but it’s used unpretentiously. Another hallucination produces one of the film’s best scenes: John’s imagined conversation with his wife Donna (Maria Bello) in which he asks her memorably, “Did I love you enough?”

Will and John’s scenes are intercut with the anxiety of their families, who wait for news. The at-home scenes might have more weight if we didn’t already know that Will and John would survive, but they’re strong nevertheless thanks to the performances of Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Will’s wife Allison), who carry some of the film’s most emotional scenes.

Where the film encounters problems is with its peripheral characters. The film works too hard to give its minor characters moments of redemption, driving home hard its heroism-of-ordinary-people theme — like the paramedic who lost his licence due to drug abuse — but the film isn’t about them, and it shouldn’t try to be.

This problem is most pronounced with the character of Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a marine from Connecticut who feels compelled by some higher power to contribute to the rescue effort. But all of his scenes seem to come out of nowhere; he’s more an intruder than an honest-to-goodness character. The role is flatly written, broad almost to the point of caricature, standing in for everyone who felt compelled to act on 9/11 rather than existing as a specific and complete individual.

And we can credit to Dave the film’s two least convincing moments. One is just plain bizarre, a scene in a church where he tells his priest of his intention to go to ground zero while Stone gives us dramatic flashes of the cross on the wall. The other is a line of dialogue he speaks while looking upon the destruction of the collapsed towers; he says something about the smoke being the curtain God uses to protect us from what we’re not ready to see. I don’t know if this line was drawn from a real statement or is the creation of screenwriter Andrea Berloff, but either way it should have been left on the cutting room floor. And so should most have Dave Karnes.

But there is one secondary character that works. She appears in just one scene, but it may be the best scene of the film, so I’ll end my review talking about her. Internet Movie Database credits her only as “Mother in Hospital,” and she’s played by Viola Davis, an actress of force who improves any project just by appearing on screen. With her impactful eyes and steely grit, she makes this anonymous mother a compelling character, and I spent her brief scene — in which she shares grief about her missing son — wishing that all the time spent with Dave had been spent with her. I could stand to watch a whole other movie about her. It goes to show that you don’t need embellishments to tell a great story about 9/11, and you don’t need characters to act as symbols for anything. To understand the Big Picture, you need look no further than all the little pictures. The Mother in Hospital is one of them. Will and John are another. They’re powerful stories, and despite the imperfections they’re well told.