Flak Magazine: Review of United 93, 05.05.06

The two questions everyone's asking about United 93 basically boil down to how and why. The why is the more searching question — Why now? Why did this have to be dramatized? What good can come from it? — and I can only respond that it doesn't foment much in the way of pro-war or anti-war sentiment in an audience that's had even the most tenuous connection to the news for the past five years. I suspect this was really the principal concern: Does the movie politicize 9/11? Does it reduce it, or glam it up, or diminish it? As someone who considers himself fairly sensitive to movies' subtle effects, I can honestly answer that it doesn't. You can't even make the case that the passengers represented in United 93 were motivated by heroism more than survival — the movie doesn't make that shading. The most fair characterization of the movie, by a mile, is as an adaptation of The 9/11 Commission Report, and at this it is marvelous. It reads between the report's lines to infer drama but does so scrupulously. Is the reality of flight 93 lessened by having a compelling reenactment offered in its place? I have to suspect the opposite — that because the nature of movie storytelling is fundamentally empathetic, you feel more strongly about the events aboard flight 93 for having experienced them, and not in a way that turns them saccharine or cloying.

This gets into the how question. The movie, which after about 20 minutes gets rolling into something sufficiently resembling real time, is shot by writer/director Paul Greengrass in a shakycam verite style that he honed making actual documentaries for the BBC. The movie is shot more like coverage of a historial recreation than a blocked, one-scene-at-a-time drama. And while the director is not above the occasional sly moment of commentary, as when the fundamentalist terrorists in the airport slide past three of four consecutive backlit advertisements featuring salacious women, the movie reeks of objectivity. Every speaking character seems grounded in human nature, with no stock angels or demons. The terrorists are not subjects of sympathy, but are portrayed with enough sensitivity to prick your empathy receptors in a way that your standard movie Arab terrorist does not. (The scene in which you know you're in good directorial hands is when the terrorists sit at the gate with their intended victims, and you watch them work to maintain their tunnel vision.)

The movie prompts a lot of how questions that challenge the viewer to consider how movies are usually processed. The obvious application of this is the climax, in which the passengers attempt to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers, and the rhythms ingrained in moviegoers tell you that they're going to succeed while your rational mind reminds you that of course they don't. But it has more subtle manifestations as well. For instance, peripheral characters are sometimes dressed in ways than, in most movies, would be a filmmaker's show of condescension to middlebrow, middle-American sensibilities, but here those quick sketches ring true — rather than stereotypes, they seem sui generis. More to the point, when the movie starts talking about events that happen outside of its airliner/FAA/central command story spaces — such as the attempts to secure executive authorization to shoot down the planes — the movie relies on the audience being able to bring outside knowledge of that day's events to the theater with them in order to make the story work. United 93 is inspired by The 9/11 Commission Report, but it returns the favor by breathing life into that report, filling those spaces between the lines with the electric, communal understanding generated by the audience of a movie working at the height of its powers.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)