OLIVER STONE : "TERRORISM CAN BE LIVED WITH"

"AMERICA HAS ATTACKED ITSELF....I'M ASHAMED FOR MY COUNTRY"

By Darryl Mason

Oliver Stone probably wanted a bit of controversy to promote his new movie 'World Trade Centre', because the movie itself is not controversial, it's surprisingly mainstream and straightforward for Oliver Stone.

Well, if he wanted some controversy, he's starting to get it, by delivering headline quotable quotes like these during interviews to promote 'WTC' :

"We have destroyed the world in the name of security..."

Mr. Bush has set America back 10 years, maybe more."

And the cruncher of the bunch :

"Terrorism is a manageable action. It can be lived with..."

Stone remains one of the most controversial film directors in the world, but Oliver Stone's (JKF, Natural Born Killers, Alexander) new film 'World Trade Centre' is proving to be controversial only for its widely reported blandness and ultra-patriotism.

Stone's 'WTC' follows the struggle of two Port Authority workers to survive as they lie trapped in the debris pile of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11.

It's a straightforward, action-drama about American heroes, and it's already copped a brutal shredding by British film critics (see below).

When Stone was announced as the director of 'WTC', there were widespread fears amongst American conservatives that he was going to make a conspiracy-rich movie about the events of 9/11, instead of portraying the 'official version' of the disputed events.

Stone says he's not interested in the massive, and fast-growing, 9/11 Truth Movement, and their theories about the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and complicity in the attacks by the Bush White House.

But Stone said yesterday he is considering making a movie about another 9/11 conspiracy - one that is already thoroughly documented and bedrock solid :

"The far greater conspiracy occurred after 9/11 when basically a neo-cabal inside our government hijacked policy and went to war. That was as broad a conspiracy as we can get and it was about 20, 30 people. That's all, they took over...

Interviews Stone has conducted so far for the 'World Trade Centre' promotions see him more interested in discussing the events in Iraq, and the freedom-hating destruction of the Constitution by the Bush White House in the pursuit of alleged terrorists and the right to torture 'enemy combatants'.

It's hard not to get the feeling that Stone made 'WTC' to get a hit movie so he could get the budget and a pass to make another movie about a subject that interests him far more than heroic rescues.

And that would be the corruption and deceptions and insidious machinations of the Bush White House as they conned the nation, and Australia and the United Kingdom, into launching a savage war on Iraq.

Here's Oliver Stone in quotes, from his media junket to promote 'World Trade Centre' :

"We have destroyed the world in the name of security..."

"From Sept. 12 on, the incident (the attacks) was politicized and it has polarized the entire world...It is a shame because it is a waste of energy to see that the entire world five years later is still convulsed in the grip of 9/11.

"It's a waste of energy away from things that do matter which is poverty, death, disease, the planet itself and fixing things in our own homes rather than fighting wars with others."

"If there had been a better sense of preparation, if we had a leadership that was more mature...We did not fight back in the same way that the British fought the IRA or the Spanish government fought the Basques here. Terrorism is a manageable action. It can be lived with..."

"This war on Iraq is a disaster. I'm disgraced. I'm ashamed for my country....I'm also ashamed that America has attacked itself with its constitutional breakdowns. I'm deeply ashamed."

"You can't see that the United States is responsible for all the evil in the world because you can see so many dictators and so many bestial acts all over the world now. .... There is something in the human heart, the international human heart, that is evil..."

"That's the evil that turns its mind and ears on humanity and is able to say `I can kill a person in the name of God or religion.' This is not a human being, this a fanatic."

Oliver Stone is starting to talk like President Bush (!)

"And I fear that fanaticism is the result of our overreaction to 9/11..."

Okay, no he's not.

“How can you send (to war) only the poor to fight? If you’re going to war, go with everybody.”

(On why he made 'WTC') “I’m trying...to light a candle in the darkness. My earlier films were intense and powerful but, with a couple of exceptions, there was always a light in them. And since 2001, things have got so dark that any light seems to burn all the brighter. I’m talking about yin and yang, the universal battle. The European intellectuals who have criticised this movie don’t understand it because they have given up hope. We have to encourage people … the kids … because we’re facing such perilous times. Nuclear proliferation, ecological disaster, al-Qaeda, war, terror, fear, American imperialism, the breakdown of the constitution … ”

"Anyone who has been through war knows suffering. Knows what it means to kill or lose somebody. If Bush had ever seen it he would have thought twice about invading Iraq. Also, this concept of being born again I just don’t buy. How can you say you’re a Christian when you’ve caused the deaths of I don’t know how many civilians since 2001?"

Go Here and Here for the original articles from which these quotes were drawn.


Below you will find a review from the UK Guardian that pulls absolutely no punches in its total shredding of Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Centre' movie.

Preview audiences in the US, and early reaction from US critics, has been mostly positive, but the reaction from UK and European critics has been hardcore.

Most seem to absolutely hate it. Which is strange because Stone's last film, 'Alexander' was carbombed by US critics while it recieved a much more forgiving and accepting reaction from European critics.

Most of the UK and European reviews I've read so far talk a great deal about how grating the reviewers found the "jingoistic" patriotism and metaphorical flag-waving and sound disgusted that Oliver Stone has 'turned' on his international audience who love to see him criticise and deconstruct the American Dream.

From the UK Guardian :

There are some films so awful, of such insidious dishonesty and mediocrity, that their existence is a kind of scandal.

Oliver Stone's grotesquely boring and badly acted TV-movie-style World Trade Center spectacularly fails to do justice either to the global, geo-political nightmare of 9/11 or even to its ostensible subject: the courage of New Yorkers who risked their lives to help others that day.

It should not be possible to make a dull film on this subject, and yet Oliver Stone has managed it: a big, wilfully dumb, reactionary clunker of a movie that succeeds in cancelling the drama and avoiding all the history and the ideas.

Could it be that like many a tough-guy liberal of a certain age, Stone is trying to out-macho his conservative tormentors? Maybe. My own theory is that Oliver Stone's auto-lobotomy is an act of sentimental primitivism, a misjudged tribute to the innocent patriotic beliefs of a fondly imagined yeoman class of blue-collar Americans.

What a shaming spectacle.