United 93
Written and directed by Paul Greengrass
Universal
2006
Rating:


It's not only not too soon for "United 93," it's necessary.

A debate about the time sensitivity and necessity of Paul Greengrass' docudrama about the hijacking and passenger rebellion of United Airlines Flight 93 has loomed larger than a discussion about the film itself. The questions are important and they might have been more difficult to answer had Greengrass not delivered such an elegant, compelling and genuinely emotional film.

Neither a rousing call-to-arms of a popcorn spectacle or a toothless display of faux uplift, "United 93" tells the story of the passengers aboard the only flight that didn't reach its intended destination on Sept. 11, 2001, and the air traffic controllers and military personnel who were unable to do anything about it.

Greengrass opens his film with an almost agonizing depiction of what began as just an ordinary day: flight attendants change into heels after passengers have boarded, pilots discuss family plans, fuel is pumped into the plane and cell phone calls are made to loved ones. It also happens to be the first day of work for Ben Sliney (playing himself), who takes over as the new operations manager at the FAA's base in Herndon, Va. Even as reports start to come in of the possible hijacking of American Flight 11, there's nothing to indicate that an act of terror is underway. Sliney takes the hijacking in stride and somewhat considers it somewhat incredulously before heading into a meeting.

Only after the North Tower of the World Trade Center is struck — flight controllers in Newark, N.J., can see the smoke, although Greengrass has enough tact not to outright recreate the tragedy — does anyone begin to realize what's going on. What ensues on the ground is panic-fueled tumult and paralysis. Air traffic controllers begin to suspect that every flight that is flying semi-erratically, goes below radar and isn't responding to radio calls may have been hijacked. At one point, a list of suspected terrorist-controlled flights is up to nearly 10 planes. Meanwhile the commander at the Northeast Air Defense struggles to determine the chain of command for the authorization to shoot down passenger planes. The president is the only person allowed to give such a command and, to the commander's frustration and in the closest thing the film comes to an anti-Bush political statement, he's unreachable (Greengrass doesn't come out and say it, but Bush was spending this time in a dazed state while reading "My Pet Goat").

On United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacking gets underway belatedly, partially because of a flight delay, but also because, Greengrass hypothesizes, the terrorist meant to fly the plane was slow to put in motion an act that would ultimately claim his life. Greengrass doesn't break his spine bending over backwards to present a politically correct portrayal of Islamic jihadists, nor does he present them as evil incarnate. For Greengrass, these men are still human and are almost as frightened as the passengers they're about to kill.

After the passengers discover that three planes have hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that the terrorists don't intend to hold them for ransom, they decide to act.

Depicting this action, which has so thoroughly been mythologized in the American psyche, takes a delicate balance. This proves to be the only time when Greengrass falters. The tear-filled final phone calls, an essential part of the Flight 93 story, come close to being over-sentimentalized. The parallel drawn between the praying passengers and the praying terrorists shows that both groups turned to God in the final moments, but it some ways it also, perhaps inadvertently, feeds into the Bush-ian idea of the Christian God being greater than the Muslim God.

Yet this is also Greengrass' greatest triumph. The passengers' attempt to reclaim the plane is depicted as a chaotic act of desperation. Unlike the legend propagated until the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the passengers don't rise up in the name of patriotism or martyrdom, but in the hopes of saving their own lives. By returning the humanity to the passengers of Flight 93, Greengrass increases their heroism.

Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/united93