The same is true of “World Trade Center.” It is undeniably powerful, an immensely affecting and well-meaning real-life tale of two Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble underneath the collapsed concourse between the North and South Towers.

Nonetheless, because “World Trade Center” tells a story of joyous survival rather than a story of death, it is a fundamental falsification of the meaning of 9/11 – even though the story it tells is true. ~John Podhoretz, New York Post

Via Michelle Malkin

So, in Little Pod’s estimation, even a film that is widely regarded on the conventional NR–bandwagon right as a good and uncharacteristically decent Oliver Stone film must hew to some political line of what 9/11 means or else it becomes false (even when it is true)?  Leave it to some neocon to be a killjoy and impose the requirements of their stale ideology on something that, by all accounts, they ought to be able to appreciate.  Podhoretz reveals what really bothers him about the movie at the end:

“United 93” ends with a plane crash. “World Trade Center” ends with a smiling child. One wonders what Stanley Kubrick would have made of that.

Perhaps it is meant to say that life goes on, or perhaps it could mean that terrorists do not get to have the last word in dictating how we live.  It could mean any number of things, but because WTC does not end on a note of grim horror it has somehow failed to convey the horror of the day.  That, I would suggest, says more about the problems with Mr. Podhoretz and the warped world he inhabits than it does about any of the merits or flaws of this particular picture.