World Trade Center...

Here's a first hand account of a screening for the highly anticipated World Trade Center a film about 9/11, from director Oliver Stone. Courtesy of today's column by Roger Friedman of Fox News.Com

Six weeks ago, I told readers of this column about seeing the first half hour of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was a sneak peek, but I predicted that Stone had made an excellent movie about the Sept. 11 tragedies based on what we saw that night.

Last night, a handful of others and I got another preview — this time of the full film. It was shown to us on high-definition videotape, with temporary music and not all of it has been color corrected.

As Stone said to us in a statement that was read aloud before the screening: There wasn't a bit of actual film in what we watched. The final cut is slated to hit theaters Aug. 9.

Even so, I can still tell you from this screening that Stone has made an elegant, powerful, moving and genuinely personal document about the horrors that happened inside and outside of the World Trade Center.

Because of its scope, "World Trade Center" is grander than "United 93" and perhaps has some loftier cinematic aspirations. And as much as it's all about the real men and women whose acts of courage nearly got them killed that day, "World Trade Center" is nonetheless an Oliver Stone film through and through.

What Stone has done is base his movie on the stories of two Port Authority policemen who went into Tower 2 of the World Trade Center too late and with little information. The building collapsed on them, burying them and their colleagues.

Only 20 people were pulled from the rubble alive. John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno — played respectively by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena — were numbers 18 and 19.

We have to think of "World Trade Center" as a movie first — and in that Stone has done an excellent job. The three best-known actors are Cage, Maria Bello as McLoughlin's wife and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jimeno's wife. From then, on, however, the casting of this film is really terrific.

There are lots of small parts, and you'll see Donna Murphy, Patti D'Arbanville, Stephen Dorff, William Mapother, Dorothy Lyman, Frank Whaley and Nicholas Turturro, among others. The underused Viola Davis has a beautiful turn toward the end as a woman Bello's character meets in a waiting room. It's like a who's who of character actors.

Andrea Berloff's script gently weaves together the stories of the McLoughlin and Jimeno families, avoiding ethnic stereotypes. The screenplay feels streamlined and clean, wasting no time telling the story of how the men became trapped and what was done to save them.

Much of Cage and Pena's performances rely on close-ups of their faces in the dark, and often just their voices to get them through scenes. That these are incredibly effective says as much about the actors as it does the director.

And don't think that because we know the end of the story there aren't some surprises. In particular, there is one moment underneath the collapsed skyscrapers between the trapped policemen that will leave you shaken — it's so unexpected.

The movie also makes a hero of Dave Karnes, the retired Marine who discovered where McLoughlin and Jimeno were hidden. Karnes, played by Michael Shannon, was in his Wilton, Conn., office when he saw the towers fall. He got a haircut, changed into fatigues and drove to Ground Zero.

Karnes' story is really one of serendipity and fate, although Stone — and it wouldn't be one of his films otherwise — tries to paint him as a sort of mythic, unknown American soldier-hero. We'll let him have that.

What Stone has done, though, is make a real war movie with the World Trade Center as a battlefield. In that way, it almost resembles his best film, "Platoon," as the Port Authority cops are instantly turned into soldiers who know they may not be coming home.

Cage comes across as a kind of John Wayne figure, with Pena as his loyal student. You can feel Stone straining toward emulating John Ford, and I think a few times he actually achieves it, especially in the scenes with Cage and Pena underground.

But mostly Oliver Stone has made a wrenching, accurate account of a terrible tragedy seem personal and immediate. There's nothing exploitative here, just good, well-wrought drama.

I've never been too keen on Nicolas Cage as an actor---but I will definitely see WTC--just the same...