Heroism, not terrorism; As the fifth anniversary 9/1 looms, one of the world' controversial film directors releases his take on the tragedy. Here's the first review... WORLD TRADE CENTER.

Byline: By DAVID ANSEN at the New York premiere of Oliver Stone's

WILL Jimeno, a New York Port Authority cop, is shooing away prostitutes and beggars from the bus terminal when he hears a loud rumble overhead.

The camera pans, not up at the sky, but down the street to reveal the shadow of a low-flying plane climbing the face of a building. We never see the planes crashing.

Director Oliver Stone is letting us know, right from the start, that we will see history unfold as it happened on the ground, from the perspectives of ordinary men and women.

And Stone's heroes are not prepared for the disaster.

Most of the cops in the little squad headed by Sgt John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) don't volunteer to go into the buildings. But a few, including Jimeno (Michael Pena), step forward. The men are obviously frightened, especially when they hear the thump of bodies falling around them.

They don't rush boldly into the buildings, but rather move slowly, hesitantly. Still, they do their duty in the face of terrible danger. Their bravery, and the courage of their families, helps redeem the darkest of days.

This is not the 9/11 story most people would expect from the director of JFK and Born On The Fourth Of July. There are no conspiracies lurking in the background. No axes to grind.

Five years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Stone was asked what kind of film he'd make in response to them. He described one structured like a hunt, which would show how terrorism worked from both the Arab and the American sides.

"And if it were done realistically, without the search for a hero, which is often required, it would be a fascinating procedure," he said back then.

These days, if Stone has a theory about September 11, he's keeping it to himself.

World Trade Center has no interest in the terrorism. It's explicitly about heroism. It may strike some, at first glance, as a surprisingly conventional film from this controversial filmmaker. "The beauty of the script was that it had hope," says Stone, who knew that, after Alexander and other commercial failures, Hollywood regarded him as tainted goods, never mind his two Oscars.

Many of World Trade Center's concerns -Stone's fascination with men in groups, with working-class camaraderie, with the nature of courage - can be traced back 20 years, to Platoon.

At the simplest level, it's a rescue movie.

McLoughlin, 53, and Jimeno, 38, were on a rescue mission themselves when the building collapsed around them.

Stone's terrifying re-creation of the towers' imploding is the first time a filmmaker has shown us what it must have felt like from the inside.

But it's that deathly quiet moment after the screen goes black, when we first see in the darkness the pinned, immobile body of McLoughlin buried in rubble, that the viewer feels a stab of claustrophobic panic.

The release of World Trade Center a few months after Paul Greengrass's shattering United 93 indicates a 180-degree turn in the five years since the attack, at least in Hollywood's response.

Immediately after 9/11, many filmmakers digitally erased images of the towers from their movies for fear that a glimpse of those buildings in an innocuous romantic comedy like Serendipity would jar an audience. And a moment in Spider-Man that had featured the superhero spinning a web between the towers was cut.

But now Stone takes us deep into the charred heart of Ground Zero.

United 93 was a brilliant piece of film-making, but many people, knowing how the story ended, understandably refused to submit themselves to the experience. It left the taste of ashes in your mouth.

World Trade Center is a very different movie. For one thing, it's a story few of us have heard. More crucially, it holds out hope - it's a story of survival and selflessness.

THE film is several things - an act of commemoration, an edge-of-your-seat rescue movie and a moving tribute to all who risked and gave their lives

It is also a family drama that examines the marriages that, in Stone's view, gave John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno reasons to live. (Maria Bello, all coiled tension, plays Donna McLoughlin, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, pitched a hair-breadth short of hysteria, plays Allison Jimeno. Both are superb.)

For Stone, the movie ponders one question: "What keeps people alive?" As the reticent leader racked with guilt about the men he's lost, and as the younger man who had grown up dreaming of becoming a cop, Cage and Pena, acting for much of the movie under the constraint of stillness, do an extraordinary job of illuminating the inner turmoil of these plain-spoken men.

"The consequences of 9/11 are enormous to this world, not just to America," says Stone. "This movie is made for the world, and if it's what I hope it to be, it transcends 9/11. It's about anybody, anywhere, who feels the taste of death, whether it was a bombing in Madrid or an earthquake or a tsunami."

World Trade Center celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.

WORLD Trade Center opens in the UK on September 29

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It is a story few of us have heard.. one of hope

CAPTION(S):

FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL: Stephen Dorff, left, and Nicolas Cage' HERO: Cage and his team