Countdown to Director Oliver Stone's "W"

W may be Stone's Endgame

Before even thinking about W, it is necessary to divide Oliver Stone’s career into two parts: Respectable and Not Important. You may remember his notable films Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. 1986-1995 were Stone’s halcyon days, his Age of Respectability. While I can’t seem to rewatch any of these, they’re not altogether unpleasant; though historically inaccurate, there’s a sick pleasure in being there in the courtroom as Kevin Costner guides us through the grainy “Back, and to the left” Zapruder footage. You want those sneaky government types to pay, because for all his bringing the world this much closer to Armageddon, deep down people liked Jack Kennedy. With Nixon – which I actually haven’t seen – you have a figure so vile that the movie writes itself. Add Anthony Hopkins and it’s not really surprising when you’re thanking the Oscar committee for their fifteenth nomination of your cinematic achievements.

Oliver Stone's Fall From Grace: 1996-Present

With his career firmly established in a decade of important films, Stone in 1996 could have gazed back at the Age of Respectability with pride, content with his considerable talent as a writer and director. But he didn’t. And now we’re dealing with his mess. Leaving credibility and good taste behind, Stone dove head first into the first of the many mistakes which mark his Age of Unimportance. 1997’s U-Turn. Besides a grizzled Nick Nolte playing himself, there was little to take away from the dull tumbleweed thriller.

Any Given Sunday (1999)

Then Stone decided to try his hand at a sports movie, and what we got was 1999’s Any Given Sunday. Though by no means as bad as what lay ahead, half of this movie is Al Pacino screaming blitz formations into his boom mic. The other half is Jamie Foxx trying to act. None of it is important.

Alexander (2004)

As bad as the opening shots of Stage II Stone were, they paled in comparison to the outright embarrassments looming only years away. Going into hiding for five years, Stone reemerged with his Frankenstein monster, 2004’s Alexander. Topping out at 207 minutes, Alexander “Final Cut,” the third, direct-to-Walmart iteration of Stone’s epic, is what you’d expect if the History Channel decided to make an overwrought six part miniseries for non-humanities majors.

Oliver Stone as Respectable Filmmaker

But you can’t give up on the guy who brought us Platoon for Pete's sake. Not yet, anyway. I was willing to forgive flops like U-Turn and moneymakers like Alexander because Oliver Stone was still a comparatively respectable man. At a time when Bruckheimers, Bays and Emmerichs reigned supreme with the full support of the untold millions who fueled their overblown summer blockbusters, Stone stood as the semi-respectable old guard; a knight-errant fallen from grace, but noble nonetheless.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center: Beginning of the End

World Trade Center destroyed that image. Shattering the glass floor separating the miserable second half of Oliver Stone’s career from oblivion, this crass recreation of September 11, 2001 plunged him forever into the murky depths of absolutely worthless genre pieces; the layer of hell just above the creators of Disaster Movie and Bum Fights. The tag line says it all: “Glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.” It’s telling that Nicolas Cage and his gang of back lot b-actors running wide-eyed through smoldering cgi rubble for two hours exemplifies the best of our cultural values. In terms of disregard for basic human dignity, I feel like for all its good intentions, World Trade Center is only slightly better than an episode of True Life. 9/11 was bad, we get it. In fact, we got it so long ago that we didn’t need to be reminded five years hence precisely how bad it was.

W's Cast and Execution Spell the End of Stone's Credibility

World Trade Center marked the end of Stage II Stone’s laughably bad phase and announced with thundering cannons his far more dangerous penultimate phase. But it would take something even more disgustingly self important to complete the transformation into UltimoStone. Something so stupid that its component parts were not included in the mathematical set of all possible combinations of cosmic matter. Something so absurdly over the top that it became sentient and perceived its own embarrassing existence. It would take something like Oliver Stone’s final testament, 2008’s W, to see him through to his full-throttle, straight to the moon endgame.

W

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