Scottish composer
Craig Armstrong (Love Actually, Ray, The Quiet American) infuses director
Oliver Stone's World Trade Center with all of the dread, sorrow, respect, and unity that the subject deserves. Like
John Powell's tasteful and quiet score for the similarly themed United 93,
Armstrong has chosen to let the story provide the power, painting slow swaths of quiet melancholy with piano, cello, and choir over images of brutality, despair, and hope, much like
Stone's use of
Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in his 1986 Academy Award-winning rendering of the Vietnam War, Platoon.
Armstrong's subtle use of electronics and acoustic guitar helps to ground the more traditional classical elements of the score, providing a window into 2001 without opening it all the way. This is desperation at its most elegant and elegance at its most desperate. ~ James Christopher Monger