United 93 (****)

Simulating a real-time documentary, writer-director Paul Greengrass portrays the morning of 9/11. The accumulation of detail and a melodrama-free focus on events, not any one individual, gives the story its power.

I was curious about how I’d react to this movie. Having seen director Paul Greengrass’s earlier docudrama Bloody Sunday, I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t veer into sappiness or cheap jingoism. But seeing the 9/11 events on TV now seems almost like watching atomic bomb footage, and I wondered if seeing this would bring back some of the emotions of when it occurred. The best thing I can say about United 93, which shortly followed a TV movie called Flight 93, is that it did. Greengrass’s approach is simply to show the events in real time. John Powell’s subtle score certainly adds to the mood, but in many ways the movie is something like what a real documentary might have been like, had people been there to film it. There are no stars, either in the sense of well-known actors or in the sense that any particular person’s role was emphasized, although Ben Sliney makes an impression as the FAA national commander who was on duty the morning of 9/11. (Like many of the ground crew, Sliney plays himself.)

Watching Bloody Sunday I thought I’d have liked a stronger character to identify with, but I didn’t miss that here, perhaps because the real-time approach was so powerful, perhaps because the event was more familiar. I’d also wondered if the movie might be dull due to this familiarity, but in fact the dramatization showed the events in a new light, as well as some things I hadn’t known or remembered. For example, a simple flight delay was probably a large reason why 93 didn’t hit the hijackers’ target. As the hijackers headed toward their target, the passengers were aware of the World Trade Center being hit, and so would have realized that, unlike other hijackers, the ones here were not intending to land. For their part, the ground personnel were slow to realize what was happening, both because the event was unique and because the air-traffic control system conveys incomplete information unless the pilots cooperate. At a certain point, the film switches focus from the ground to the air, an implicit acknowledgment that, by then, the people on the ground had become irrelevant. Obviously, the action aboard the plane is a reconstruction based on the black box recording (presumably) and the calls made aboard the flight. There are no flashbacks, so we know little about the passengers, but this is an asset because the range of their actions and reactions seems universal.

I’m sure some people who see this movie will find their political views reinforced, but I don’t think this was intended as a political film. Could the military response been swifter? Could the hijackings have been prevented? These aren’t questions that this film tries to answer. From the standpoint of the people portrayed, 9/11 was an ordinary day that became something else. Depicting this reality through an accumulation of small details is what gives the movie its power.

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13