United 93

dir: Paul Greengrass
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Apparently when trailers for this flick were playing in front of films last year, audience members, at least in the States, would sometimes yell out “Too soon”. Five years after the fact, it’s hard to say when the appropriate amount of time could pass for films about that day not to hurt.

The 9/11 attacks transformed American society, impacted on the world in general and changed the way the rest of us look at movies. Even films as disparate as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remake and the more recent Inside Man are suffused with imagery or the pathos of those dark days. For those of us who are not American, they can still represent a great source of sadness and anger, and a film dealing with what happened can be just as resonant even if the personal element is lacking.

United 93 looks at the attacks on America by Islamic fundamentalists from the grunt’s eye point of view. Although much of the footage is of the terrorists on one of the flights, and the passengers, much of the screen time is taken up with various people working as flight controllers and at Air Force facilities watching the events unfold on their radar screens or on the news.

The film takes its moment-to-moment you are there faux realism to the extreme of having all the footage recorded with handheld cameras, increasing the tension in the audience, and in some cases, making them nauseous as well. I recall some cinemas showing the film had warning signs recommending people who were susceptible to nausea from shaky-cam should sit up the back. I can’t see how it would help, but hell, some people like being told what to do.

Even scenes of relative tranquillity are filmed with shaky-cam, so it increases the tension of an already intense experience. The greatest tension, of course, arises from the fact that we know the ultimate fate of the plane, and that there is no escaping from it regardless of what the passengers ultimately do. That doesn’t decrease the interest level at all. If anything, the very human impulse to desperately wish for the result to be changed, to somehow have these people saved is there regardless of what we know will happen.

As events unfold, disparate groups of people in the air and on the ground find out piecemeal that something very terrible is happening. Information is moving at the speed of light, but so, too, are the events as they are happening. The government tries to respond, the air controllers are trying to make sense of a situation they haven’t had to deal with in the States since the 80s, and the sheer magnitude of what is happening doesn’t sink in until it is way too late.

When the first plane hits the Twin Towers, the natural confusion reigns: it must be an accident, it is incomprehensible that it could be deliberate. No one can grasp for the longest time that what they are seeing is part of this grand scheme. They watch (‘they’ being the air industry people, the public and the military) the same footage that we watched as this unfolded, of smoking towers and a Pentagon partially in ruins, equally disbelieving.

The terrorists are depicted as almost spastically disorganised but fuelled by faith strong enough to do what should be unimaginable. One, the ostensible pilot, is reluctant, so reluctant to initiate the attack. He has to be goaded into it by one of his fellow nutjobs. Before getting things started, we see him whispering words of reluctant love into a mobile phone.

The passengers and attendants on the plane go about their mundane activities, as does everyone in the flick, until the evitable becomes inevitable. When they are deciding what to do, after learning of the fates of other planes similarly hijacked, they are hardly united; they argue and vacillate and scream and do anything and everything as they stare death in the face. The committed terrorists are as terrified of the passengers as the passengers are of them. When the violence comes, whether it is the terrorists brutally killing passengers or pilots, or vice versa, it is as horrific and visceral as anything else that happened on that day.

We don’t get to know any of the people that well, and do we really need to for such a flick to be effective? As a document, as a way of facing how it might have been, United 93 stands above many other possible approaches (including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre) because it doesn’t try to transform the tragedy into a jingoistic triumph. Sure, there were plenty of heroes that day, stories of incredible self-sacrifice and people coming together in the most basic and human of ways, but this visceral movie wants to record what happened. Let history judge these people, both the heroes and the villains.

We see the terrified passengers, once they find out what their likely fate is going to be, calling their loved ones, their families, whoever they can to say, in effect, goodbye. In such scenes, the acting and the dialogue (none of which feels like dialogue) are irrelevant, because the magnitude of what is happening is so heart wrenching. What else can people say in the face of annihilation, apart from ‘I miss you’, or ‘I love you’?

United 93 is a deeply affecting movie about the events of that day, or should I write That Fateful Day. It is impossible to separate how we feel about that day from depictions of it, of course, so it’s hard for me to identify whether it’s the film I’m responding to or my own feelings and memories of it. Regardless, Paul Greengrass honours the people who were involved from the ground level up without being exploitative or hackneyed, and whilst I can question the logic of using shaky-cam even during quiet scenes, I can’t argue with the visceral feel that the film captures and sustains until the end.

In the end, there is sadness, of course, but there is also anger. It’s not the righteous anger of wanting to invade a country in revenge, or the ‘My god can beat up your god’ mentality. We’re left with more of an anger towards people who can allow their faith to become so paramount and so twisted that an atrocity such as this can seem like the sensible thing to do. It is incomprehensible to me, not just because I lack faith, but because that certainty of righteousness is terrifying, and we now see the results of it playing out around the world. United 93 captures this madness in a way that the multitude of documentaries that will keep coming out for decades to come won’t be able to.

8 out of 10

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“Ziad. It's time.” – it sure is, United 93.

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