In May, at the 2006 Cannes Movie Festival, director Oliver Stone unveiled the first 26 minutes of his new film World Trade Center just before the 20th anniversary showing of Platoon. Mr. Stone is the same guy that gave us great and diverse films like Salvador, Wall Street and Any Given Sunday. It was received with the overwhelming appreciation that the academy -award-wining Platoon did not receive 20 years earlier at the same festival.

At one time, it seemed Stone was preserving the turbulent 60s on film with Nixon, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and The Doors. All of these have something in common with World Trade Center: they are all controversial. And WTC promises to be no less so.

But WTC is controversial in a different way. It is spiritual. In the trailer, this is made especially clear. Two firemen join other life savers in aiding the victims in the World Trade Center on that fateful, infamous day known as 9/11, but get trapped alive under the falling building. The trailer's closing scene shows us their faces. The screen reads: “The world saw evil that day.” As the camera pans to the cloudy sky above, as though the men are seeing a heavenly vision, the screen reads: “Two men saw something else.”

World Trade Center, stars Nicolas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena and reenacts the real life of New York Port Authority cops John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who heroically rushed into the Twin Towers to save lives and nearly died being buried alive in the rubble. Sometimes people have their most spiritual moments in near death experiences. And so it is here. Did I say nearly died? Yes, because unlike United 93, where all the courageous people die, these two men lived and were happily reunited with their families. The film does not center on this happier ending, its real center is on the evil of that day. This is the story of an unimaginable horror and the contrasting “something more.”

In the midst of unimaginable horror there can be a profound sense of divine presence. Stone’s film brings to mind the famous Hebrew shepherd’s poem, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.”
And so it was. And so it is. What is getting my attention, however, is this surfacing spiritual sense within Oliver Stone. Now that is noteworthy.