Some of the rightwingers have a very similar complaint: that the movie fails to note who was to blame for the attack (obviously they would like some explicit Muslim bashing).
And are those polls really accurate about how many people believe Saddam Hussein authored 9-11? I have never encountered a single person anywhere who expressed that belief-- not online, even on rightwing blog sites (Redstate, etc.) and not in extensive travels since 9-11 that have taken me to 37 of the 50 states, including most of the Southern and Western states. At most, I have heard people eager for revenge against any Arabs/Muslims anywhere and who figured that since Saddam Hussein was such an SOB we might as well start with Iraq.

This is absurd. A filmmaker has every right to present his vision in any way he sees fit. This is a piece of historical fiction, not a documentary claiming to propogate the truth.

What's more, the film takes place in 2001 before Cheney's mistruths were corrected.

You seem to have forgotten the spiteful vengence that existed in the U.S. in the weeks and months following the attacks.

Selective memory I suppose...

It's interesting, though the politicized memorials and so on of that terrible day have filled me with dread, I still think that Stone made the right decision. He made a memorial to the fallen, and to the courage shown by these people in the face of great sorrow and suffering. Does anybody not know who did it? It was Saddam-- er, no, it was Osama. Stone has made a memorial. A fitting tribute. They're gone. On one level, it doesn't matter who did it. It could have been a great fire, or a natural disaster. But they're gone.

Exactly. My son (aspiring director) saw it and noticed the Iraq mention, and lack of AQ reference.

I'm shocked! You mean to suggest that Americans actually think Hollywood films are reliable sources of information about current events? Nawww . . . Americans may be dumb, but that dumb? Surely, you must be joking . . .

I gotta agree with Gettysberg, an artist makes his own choices. We can disagree with these choices or dislike them or feel they don't work... but they're the artists to make. Ruth Rosen is free to make her own 9/11 movie, or novel, or essay. I won't tell her how to write it.

The scandal is not limited to pushing the lie that 9/11 had anything to do with Iraq, the scandal is the denial of what the 9/11 motives were:

Dishonesty about 9/11 motives robs Americans of the freedom to decide for ourselves if we want to put our lives at risk over specific foreign policies.

President Bush said recently, "it seems like to me that the Commander-in-Chief ought to listen to what the enemy says." I agree, it makes sense that if we want to know their motives, we listen to what they have been saying. What they have been saying has been clear and consistent for years.

The terrorist behind the 1993 attack on the WTC sent a letter to the NYT which said: "This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

"We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine . This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel." -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

The 9/11 Commission reported on the motive of the "mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks." On page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report, it says "By his own account, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

The two terrorist pilots who crashed the two planes into the WTC shared the same motivation. Mohammed Atta, who flew into WTC 1, was described by one Ralph Bodenstein, who traveled, worked and talked with him, as "most imbued actually about Israeli politics in the region and about U.S. protection of these Israeli politics in the region. And he was to a degree personally suffering from that." Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who flew into WTC 2, was focused on the same thing, telling a friend, "How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?"
Mainstream media certainly has not made it easy to understand what motivated the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

i'm with hoppy. i think films like this border on obscene. stone was never a 'great director' in my mind, but whatever credibility he had is gone with this piece of garbage.

This is slightly off-topic, but what the heck.

I was reading the weekend box office returns in this morning's New York Newsday. The accompanying article claimed -- with no explanation -- that World Trade Center's third-place finish "exceeded expectations."

WHAT!?!? We're talking about a film with Oliver Stone behind the camera, Nicholas Cage in front of the camera, and a tsunami of paid advertising and free publicity before it. Oh yeah, and it's also about the defining moment of our lifetime.

For a movie with all these built-in advantages to finish third in its opening weekend behind a goofball Will Ferrell comedy and a low-budget teen chick flick sounds awfully disastrous to me.

Does Oliver Stone's agent write for Newsday?

I think you and Gettysburg and others are overlooking the fact that every significant piece of mass art has a political consequence and as such critics should, indeed, address the political aspect. Art doesn't happen within a socio-political void.

I am in the situation of both agreeing and disagreeing with you.

You are correct in that art (and I don't confine this to significant pieces of mass art) has political effect or political consequence.

Indeed, I can't see how that can be avoided. Art is essentially a form of communication, it must be about something, it springs from, has a relationship to, and amounts to a comment of sorts about the world. All art is therefore a form of metaphor, and in that metaphor is a political commentary.

Art which is most profoundly disconnected has no particular significance and no impact.

Having said that though, explicitly political art is often the least interesting. It reduces itself to a hollow polemic, more interested in catering to a political line than actually communicating.

I have in mind the novels of Ayn Rand, or old Soviet art. Nothing more than dreary tracts or images, reflecting obsessions, but adding nothing to them.

The reality is that politics is only an aspect, a kind of narrow window onto life and living. Thus, to focus on art through that window, either as analysis or as a motivation for art or even as the defining issue shaping the creation of that art is appallingly circumscribed.

This is what I feel produces the emptiness and lack of depth of polemical or political artworks in most cases.

Art has its power in the ability to speak to life, and to reflect the concerns and issues of life. To the extent that it operates as a naked reflection, it isn't very interesting.

We don't need polemical stories to say what we can simply say to each other directly.

The mirror is most revealing when it is distorted, when the correlations are not one to one, when the political message or the other message admits to flexibilit.

Consider the seminal "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" from the 1950's. Was it a movie about McCarthyism? About the creeping conformity of 1950's society? About communist infiltration? Of sexual panic? Or runaway paranoia? About weakness and lack of resolution? Each of these constructions can be read into it? Which is valid? Perhaps all?

Or, for a more lowbrow example, consider the slasher films of the 80's, where all the teens who had sex got killed, and only the good girl survived? Doesn't this represent a very regressive conservative anti-sex political morality? Or was it really speaking to the fears and insecurities of teens navigating their way into through the sexual and social minefields of adolescence? Or was it a subversive feminist tract where the lumbering anti-sex monster is always male in traditional garb and the heroine saves herself without need for a heroic male?

Part of the point is that art is interesting and worthwhile for its ambiguity, for the fact that we have to work to deconstruct it and it admits to understandings in different ways.

This is because art, in its different ways, struggles to be reflective of life, and struggles to reflect the issues that animate life. Life is a big goddammed topic. It's almost as big as the universe and everything and all the fish. The decisions that go into making a piece of art are nearly infinite, and they're personal and idiosyncratic to the artists.

In this sense, I think that an artist needs to have the right to decide for themselves what decisions and choices to make. It's up to them, not up to us. If we don't like those decisions or choices, we can make our own art.

Ultimately, the test for a piece of art is whether it has an effect, whether it succeeds or fails on its own merits. This is a decision almost as idiosyncratic as the decision chains of the artist. The difference is that at this point, consensuses of various sorts may form.

But the test is not and should not be whether it caters to some specific political plot point.

The impact of a film such as this today will be far different than the impact of this same film viewed 30 years from now. (Even if it were re-made as taking place in 2031.)

So?

I am actually surprised to hear it argued that Oliver Stone, in particular, has made a film about recent events that is not of political signifigance.

I really do think that after making Natural Born Killers, Stone really had very little left to say about America as a whole.

Of course the creator of a work of art (whether this film really is a work of art or not I don't know, not having seen it)

Son, it's all art. Guys making chalk drawings on the street, and multi-million dollar hollywood blockbusters. Doodles, cartoons, caricatures and flemish and Renaissance masterpieces. It's all art. Not necessarily good art, not necessarily bad art, it may last or it may not, sometimes it speaks to everyone, sometimes only to the artist. But its art. And if we as humans define ourselves, I would say we are the animal that makes art.

and others should be able to debate the political import of the piece. To ignore it seems naive at best.

But I don't ignore it. I simply object to Ms Rosen's assertion that Oliver Stone should have made some specific political comment. As I've said, Mr. Stone made his choices. She is free to make her own 9/11 movie, write her own novel, or produce her own essay on the topic... which indeed, she has.

I am actually surprised to hear it argued that Oliver Stone, in particular, has made a film about recent events that is not of political signifigance.

This is the guy that made Gardens of Stone, JFK and Nixon. He has chosen to make particular movies on the major people/events because he has a vision/idea about the past, and wants to influence how other people think about that past. Given the influence he has on the public, I think he does indeed have an obligation that goes beyond his right to make art. He also has a responsibility to the truth.