The start of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center — "based on actual accounts of surviving participants" — emphasizes the routines that shaped so many lives the morning of Sept. 11. The point being, of course, that "everything changed" that day. (The fact that it actually didn't is a topic the film does not take up.) The change is rendered at first in stark, affecting images. Following his daily 90-minute commute, John sends his men out to patrol midtown bus stations and clear panhandlers off the sidewalks. No soundtrack music, no camera swoops, nothing showy. And then, simply and gigantically, while new guy Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) gazes upward, the shadow of a plane passes over a building. Cut to headquarters, where a boom is followed by very slight shaking. John and his men are dispatched to the towers, presuming they will "help." Not one of them has a clue as to how immense and impossible this task will be.

FIRST RESPONDER: Nicolas cage as Port Authority Sgt. John McLoughlin.

The film's focus on two men and their families refigures the vastness in terms that seem merely operatic. While John makes the decision to head into Tower Two with a small team in a heartbeat, their confused journey to the spot where the building will collapse on top of them feels like "destiny." While the other team members are killed in the crush of steel and fire and dust, Will and John survive, for hours (they will be numbers 18 and 19 of just 20 survivors retrieved from Ground Zero), their limbs pinned, their chests smashed under slabs of concrete, their insides bleeding. Unable to move, terrified, they can only wait.

Outside, the film shows, people watch TV (a montage of viewers around the world suggests that for a few hours, anyway, consumers everywhere were united in horror and incredulity). But if the TV images might knee-jerk viewers into their own memories, the movie is focused on the dark hole where Will and John's faces appear filthy and afraid, probed in repeated close-ups. Essentially, they talk one another into staying alive. "You know that movie GI Jane?" asks Will. Yeah, says John, "with what's-her-name." Will reminds him of "that part where the drill sergeant says, 'Pain is good, pain is your friend,'" because when you feel it, "You know you're alive."

Indeed, World Trade Center's heroism is all about pain. It's shaped by a daunting, unavoidable anti-action and layered into shots of the policemen's families coping with not knowing: Donna's son accuses her of not caring enough; Will's wife, Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), five months pregnant, heads out to pick up medication. Wandering the too-bright aisles, she sputters, "What am I doing here, walking around CVS like there's nothing wrong?"

John and Will also wonder what they're doing, or thought they were doing. Though the first responders go in determined to "help," they accomplish nothing, as John laments during a moment of despair. Instead, they lose their compatriots and their bearings. (As he is pulled from the site, Will wonders, "What happened to the buildings?") The film literalizes their efforts to maintain coherence, cutting to flashbacks on cues: Will and Allison seem almost to float in a celestial-white-lit bedroom memory; Donna looks into her empty kitchen and sees John showing their son how to build cabinets. A couple of times, the movie offers up an equivalent of Summer of Sam's talking dog, when Will sees a gorgeously backlit "Jesus with a water bottle" (again, literally, a commercial spring water bottle clutched in his sacred hand), dutifully translated from Jimeno's "account."

But these subjective weirdnesses are also energizing, and help to buoy the film against its more commonplace elements, namely, the rescuers' action heroics. Most egregious is the heavy-handed representation of Marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who hears about the attack while in Wilton, Conn., prays for guidance from Christ, then takes time to get a buzzcut before he heads south. A kind of military guardian angel, he looks at Ground Zero and proclaims, "It's like God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we're not ready to see." The guy who hears him say this looks baffled, and the Marine marches off into the smoke, seeking his own destiny, to find numbers 18 and 19.

It's one of those mythologizing, utterly Stoneian moments (think Willem Dafoe dying with arms outstretched in Platoon). That this guy goes on to seek vengeance in Iraq suggests Stone has opened the door for the Born on the Fourth of July part of this project, when the veterans reject the administration's abuse of their honorable commitments.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)