The arguments raging over United 93 aren't likely to end any time soon, so there's probably not much harm in adding one more voice to the fray. In a nutshell, I think that it's one of the best movies I've seen in a very long time, and an important one too. I should add that I have actually watched this movie. That's probably worth mentioning since most of the fuss over the film is currently being generated by people who haven't seen it, and aren't likely to.
Some of these folks are claiming that United 93 — an account of the one plane hijacked on September 11th that failed to hit its target — can't help but cheapen the memory of the event it documents. Others are afraid that the movie will inevitably become propaganda for one side or another, or that it will re-open wounds that still haven't properly healed. Some sensitive souls, having found even the film's trailer too brutalizing to bear, are predicting a splatter movie sure to traumatize the national psyche.
Emotions haven't run this high around a movie since The Passion of the Christ (another film that took some heat for throwing salt in wounds), but that actually makes a lot of sense. For better or worse, both Mel's movie and this one dare to tackle sacred cows that pretty much everybody knows by heart — which means that the movies stand or fall by making sure that the story is all in the telling.
Even if we didn't know the story of United 93, the film brings us up to speed within moments, opening with the sounds of softly murmured Arabic fusing with images of the hijackers in a hotel room, praying and preparing for their awful mission. It's a smart move showing us where the film is going at the outset, since United 93 isn't really about suspense.
What the movie is more interested in provoking, appropriately enough, is a debilitating, all-pervasive queasiness pretty close to what our German friends like to call angst. From its opening moments, United 93 shows us that the worst is in store; from then on, it's all about waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There's an eerie, formal elegance to that opening sequence, but the film quickly gets down to business, capturing details on the fly with agile, highly attentive cameras more concerned with energy and emotion than with painterly compositions or a strict allegiance to focus.
The film's director, Paul Greengrass, got his start making documentaries and applied some of those techniques to his first feature, Bloody Sunday, but what he achieves in United 93 is unprecedented. Greengrass strives for maximum authenticity here, casting mostly unknowns (some of whom, like FAA operations manager Ben Sliney, are actually playing themselves), and putting characters on the screen who talk and act the way people do in real life.
Much of Greengrass' script is a composite of the 9/11 commission report, the actual black box recordings of United 93 (recently heard at the Moussaoui trial) and interviews with dozens of family members and friends of the victims.
United 93 is drama of the first order, but it doesn't really behave like a mainstream movie — there are no conventional arcs here, either to the characters or to their story — with an entire first hour that unfolds as a collection of small, seemingly inconsequential details that simply serve to bring us into the reality of what we're observing.
The passengers sit around the waiting room reading magazines and talking on cell phones; the ground crew fuels up the plane and makes last-minute checks; the flight attendants exchange pleasantries; a pilot talks about where he's taking his wife for their anniversary. The details accumulate as an extended checklist of ordinary life, amplified and made almost unbearably poignant because of the extraordinary horror we know is also part of this picture.
By the time the poop begins hitting the fan, the tension is excruciating. The movie skillfully segues from everyday banalities into the chaos of what happened on September 11th, cutting between events in the air and on the ground. We see things as they actually appeared at the time, imperfectly, piecemeal, through the eyes of various air traffic controllers and military personal struggling to make sense of the situation via incomplete scraps of information.
Greengrass orchestrates the confusion like a mysterious, terrible symphony, and it's only when that second plane smashes into the World Trade Center — a moment as visceral as anything we're ever likely to see on screen — that the big picture finally begins to reveal itself. The obscene impossible becomes possible, hardens into reality, then passes into history before our eyes.
The film's final 50 minutes — from roughly the time the hijackers of United 93 start randomly slitting throats to the flight's fiery end — play out in real time, with a level of intensity that's not for the faint-hearted. It's worth mentioning that Greengrass does allow his terrorists their humanity — one of them even gets to murmur "I love you" to someone at the other end of his cell phone — but I'm sure some will take issue with the fact that even more humanizing wasn't done.
There are no flashbacks to someone's unhappy childhood in Saudi Arabia, for instance, or to some dastardly act of American imperialism responsible for turning a mild-mannered Muslim into a mass murderer.
That said, it must be noted that United 93 is playing with fire, and that will surely be part of its controversy — and its appeal. There are certain to be concerns about the movie spurring on fresh waves of anti-Arab or anti-Muslim sentiment, but those fears will hopefully be unfounded since Greengrass goes out of his way to avoid editorializing or emotional manipulation. (Even a much-publicized coda reading "American's war on terror had begun" was removed at the last minute in an effort to avoid flame-fanning.)
Basically, what we see up on the screen are facts, artfully arranged but so well documented that I'd be curious how the movie would play in the Arab World (where popular wisdom still has it that 9/11 was either a hoax or a plot cooked up by Jews and aliens).
In the end, the facts win, and United 93 ultimately becomes a movie less about heroism or history than it is about basic biology. When the passengers of that fated flight finally rise up against their captors, it's not as self-sacrificing superheroes acting on some grand, patriotic urge to do the right thing. They're just men and women doing whatever it takes to stay alive, individuals who finally merge into a primitive force not dissimilar from those vengeful mobs raging through old horror movies, or maybe Fritz Lang's Fury or M.
It's miles from Bowie telling us we can all be heroes, but if every disaster film is ultimately a film about triumph — and the bigger the catastrophe the bigger the glory — then this one is off the scale.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2006.