You Must Choose – Oliver Stone’s WTC trailer leads to a difficult choice.

By now you’ve likely seen Oliver Stone’s new World Trade Center trailer, and having watched it several times, I feel plagued by a dilemma. Perhaps you are, too, and you didn’t even realize it:

If World Trade Center and Michael Bay’s Transformers were opening on the same day, which would you pay to see in the theater?

That seems like a nonsensical choice, I know, but join me after the jump and I’ll explain.

Because I watch this trailer and I feel very divided by it. I agree with a lot of the buzz that I’ve read – that this is the “safe” Oliver Stone, the “Alexander Apologist” Oliver Stone. That the teaser’s got moments of terrible schmaltz and on-the-nose silliness that feel somehow below the standards that Stone has set in some of his other films.

And yet I’d honestly rather watch a bad Oliver Stone movie than pretty much anything made by Michael Bay.

Because with all of its hokum, the WTC trailer is also really well made, and this leads to the entire love/hate thing that I’ve got with most of Stone’s filmography. He’s a great filmmaker – an extraordinary craftsman – but he simply lets way too much crap filter throughout the narrative of his films. I watch something like Natural Born Killers and I’m fascinated by the way he mixes different film stock, animation, stylistic choices – all of that great cinematic stuff that other filmmakers don’t do. But I also get frustrated and angry that Mickey and Mallory in that movie have no real shading. That Stone simplistically blames the “media society” for their crimes. That there are no repercussions to their deeds, either actual or emotional.

Great filmmaking. Too much crap.

But at least it stays with you a lot of the time. You want to think about it, to delve into it and figure out how it makes you feel and why. Michael Bay movies aren’t like that. They’re superficial, forgettable, loud and manic and incomprehensible. At their worst, Stone’s films make your brain work a little; at their best, Bay’s just make it hurt.

So if your multiplex were only playing these two movies, opening on the same day – which would you choose?