And so, in the fullness of time, the event that put the kibosh on the Hollywood disaster movie became a Hollywood disaster movie itself. Not a bad one, but not an especially good one either.

After the brilliance of United 93, with its heartstopping documentary realism, it's back to familiar faces and familiar emotions in a reconstruction of the belated rescue of two Port Authority policemen trapped under rubble between the twin towers and the wives waiting to see if they've become widows.

Like United 93 director Paul Greengrass, Oliver Stone used a number of real-life participants here but while the end product will remind you of the day's horrors, you'll probably also recollect The Towering Inferno and Billy Wilder's wonderfully acerbic trapped-man saga Ace in the Hole. There's no worldly cynicism here and WTC doesn't come up with much you wouldn't imagine for yourself - except the vision of Jesus with a bottle of water seen by a near-death Michael Peña.

In a useful Q&A session among the two-disc DVD extras, Stone makes it clear that this was a real recollection arising from close collaboration with the two men - the 18th and 19th of only 20 to be rescued. He also agrees that the film is "definitely apolitical" (a common complaint of the movie's straightforward paean to maverick American heroism) and points out that the post-film caption that the pair's US Marine saviour went on to serve two terms in Iraq is also a fact. "He went to the wrong war but he represents the American public," says Stone. It's a reminder, like the film, of how much sympathy America had that September day and how wrecklessly its government dissipated it.