There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a movie about what happened on September 11, 2001 — but it has to be handled with grace. Some have done it better (United 93) than others (Reign Over Me, bonkers secret 9/11 movie Remember Me). The latest to try to walk that fine line between respectful and exploitative: 9/11. Who knows? Maybe a dramatization of what happened in Lower Manhattan 16 short years ago starring Charlie Sheen, Whoopi Goldberg, Gina Gershon, and Luis Guzmán, from the director of National Lampoon’s Cattle Call, from the same distribution company as Atlas Shrugged: Part I, will be a tasteful look at a dark day in America’s history?
[watches the trailer]
Or maybe not.
Directed and co-written by Martin Guigui, 9/11 centers on five people who “find themselves trapped in an elevator in the World Trade Center’s North Tower on 9/11,” according to the official premise. “They work together, never giving up hope, to try to escape before the unthinkable happens.” One of the people trapped in the elevator is Sheen, which is notable for two reasons: it’s his first movie role since 2013’s Machete Kills, and he’s a notorious 9/11 truther. In 2006, he told Alex Jones (yes, that Alex Jones), “It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airlines and hitting 75 percent of their targets — that feels like a conspiracy theory.” Sheen also blamed the destruction of the towers on a “controlled explosion.”
9/11 (the trailer for which you can watch above; I don’t know why it’s in Japanese, either) opens on September 8. I can’t wait.
