No one talks about it much, and when they do their faces scrunch up like they’ve smelled something. The words spit out like an insult, sour, nearly accusing.

“I’m not seeing it — why do I need to see that?”

Oliver Stone has spent most of his Hollywood career swimming in vitriol, mostly by design. He tilts at what used to be called “the Establishment,” making hot-wired movies like “JFK” and “Natural Born Killers” that trigger controversy almost as a reflex. He’s a provocateur. “World Trade Center,” the director’s take on of the events of September 11, 2001, was certain to provoke New Yorkers when it came out in early August. But the response has been a gut-level rejection. Once was enough.

“It’s not something I want to see,” Steve Bonilla, an online retailer who lives in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, said. “I was sitting in a room the whole day on 9/11, watching it on TV, waiting for news about family members. My daughter, her boyfriend, and his mom worked around the corner from the World Trade Center.”

Even though Mr. Bonilla, whose loved ones made it safely back to Brooklyn that day, imagines “World Trade Center” isn’t “a bad movie,” the subject is literally too close to home. “I already have post traumatic stress disorder from stuff that happened in childhood,” he says, sounding a bit like Woody Allen. “I don’t need another trigger. I need to stay away from it.”

That’s a common response. Everyone who was in New York that day has his or her own narrative, often tragic and at least nerve-wracking, which a film like “World Trade Center” can only seem to prod without offering much to resolve deeply emotional memories. An absurdist disaster movie like “Snakes on a Plane,” which could almost be the exploitation version of “United 93” — the year’s other 9/11 film — might actually offer more catharsis.

But there’s also been a less visceral, more critical response to the film, based on reviews that describe it as a straightforward, reverent account of two Port Authority police officers (Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin and Michael Pena as Will Jimeno) and their struggle to survive while trapped in the wreckage of the towers. The trouble is, no one goes to see Oliver Stone movies in search of reverence.

“Here’s a guy who did that documentary about Fidel Castro and sort of threw it in the faces of the hard conservatives, and now he’s making a ‘love the firefighters’ movie, which anyone can do,” argues Marc Walkow, a freelance DVD producer who lives two blocks from ground zero, and was evacuated along with his wife, Jennifer Lui, and her extended family a week after September 11. “If anyone could have tackled the conspiracy theories, it should have been Stone.”

Walkow reasons that Stone blew an opportunity to make a different kind of statement. “There are stories of heroism,” he says, “but I don’t need to see a movie to have that reinforced. If anything, five years later, some of the emotional trauma has worn off. We should be seeing movies that talk about the root causes of why it happened. It’s possible to make a patriotic movie that is questioning.”

“World Trade Center,” along with this year’s earlier “United 93,” are the first mainstream American films about the terrorist attacks, effectively staging more expensive versions of televised docudramas and documentaries. Yet simple representation, perhaps intended to commemorate and comfort, seems rather puny in the memory of the collective experience of that day.

“People don’t want to see it somehow demeaned by the Hollywood treatment,” suggests Daniel Mendelsohn, a critic and historian, whose new book “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” is a chronicle of family members claimed by the Holocaust. “To be faced with an apocalypse that is actual and real creates a distaste for big-budget destruction. You develop an allergy to watching stuff blow up on screen.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Mendelsohn saw “World Trade Center.”

“I only went because I was paid to,” he says, having written a piece on the film for the New York Review of Books. “But I have not discussed it with anyone. Not a single person that I know has gone to see this movie.”

If it were any other film, that would be stunning. New Yorkers are movie-mad, and pride themselves on their enthusiasm for the most obscure celluloid.

Late Saturday evening near the World Trade Center site, the scene is surreal enough. Tourists snap photographs of tractors through gaps in the fence along the walkway that wraps the north side of ground zero. The area is brightly lit, just like a movie set. A few blocks away, Regal Cinema’s Battery Park City Stadium 11 is showing “World Trade Center.” It’s one of five theaters in Manhattan where you can see it, and its place on the marquee inside seems either a mandatory act of tribute or a gesture as redundant as the photo booklets sold by the vendors ringing ground zero.

A young woman peers through the glass entry to the multiplex, craning her neck to check out the selection. I offer some thoughts on the relative merits of “Crank” and “Talladega Nights.” Then I pop the question.

“You could go see ‘World Trade Center.'”

Her eyes fix on mine. “No, I’m not,” Laina LeFeuvbre says, her tone suddenly sharp. “I read the paper. I know the stories. I don’t think people should have to go through it all over again, having it pushed it in their face.”

As it turns out, Ms. LeFeuvbre is a Canadian tourist and has been in town for five days, traveling on a yacht docked on the Hudson River. But she’s already talking like a true New Yorker.