director/screenwriter
Paul Greengrass
producers
Tim Bevan
Eric Fellner
Lloyd Levin
cinematographer
Barry Ackroyd
music
John Powell
editor
Clare Douglas
Christopher Rouse
cast
Lewis Alsamari (Saeed Al Ghamdi)
JJ Johnson (Captain Jason Dahl)
David Alan Basche (Todd Beamer)
Christian Clemenson (Thomas Burnett, Jr.)
Peter Hermann (Jeremy Glick)
David Rasche (Donald Freeman Greene)
Ben Sliney (Himself)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 121m
u.s.
release: 4/28/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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Resolutely un-Hollywood, Paul
Greengrass' much-discussed docudrama United 93 is being
praised more for what it's not -- cheesy, manipulative, plastic
-- than what it is. Structurally, I can't see much wrong with
it: Greengrass handles the story with a productive mix of gravity
and stylistic off-handedness. The importance of the event is
never oversold; nobody is lionized or demonized. But therein
lies the problem: as drama, it inevitably flatlines. Shackled
to the (few) known facts tighter than any other filmmaker in
recent memory, Greengrass can't elaborate, can't imagine.
After a while, the movie's free-floating sense of dread shifts
into neutral, and the incidents seem to unfold at an emotional
remove. The film seems transcribed, not told or felt.
That said, what Greengrass
does, he does superbly. The director of Bloody Sunday
and The Bourne Supremacy works with his usual shaky-cam
verisimilitude, his camera catching significant action and dialogue
out of the corner of its eye. We witness the confusion of September
11 -- the air-traffic controllers baffled by planes that have
disappeared below the radar; the military scrambling for authorization
to shoot down the planes; the disbelief that first one, then
another, then four (the number isn't clear at first) planes
have been hijacked, when there hasn't been an American hijacking
in years; the sight of that second plane hitting the World Trade
Center, demonstrating beyond a doubt that this was no accident.
The madness of that day, including all the conflicting and false
stories, is evoked with a casual chill.
Aboard United Flight 93, which
was presumably headed for the Capitol, four men sit and wait.
One is calm, presentable, bespectacled -- he could be a professor
of Middle Eastern studies. The others are younger, and more nervous,
almost crawling out of their skin to do this terrible deed. Not
out of animal hatred, though -- it's more like the fearful impatience
that drives you to leave a little early for a dentist's appointment
you're dreading. Greengrass depicts these men as men --
not monsters -- who, for whatever reasons, have come to a mental
space wherein striking at the political and economic hearts of
America seems a fine and noble goal. Depicting them as the standard
Hollywood bug-eyed bearded screechers would help no one and illuminate
nothing.
Once blood is shed on the plane
and the hijackers take over, United 93 lapses, unavoidably,
into convention -- the screaming, terrified passengers; the hijackers
shouting incomprehensibly and keeping everyone at bay with box-cutters
and a fake bomb. We've seen it before, though usually handled
less scrupulously. Some of the passengers cluster together, making
calls from the plane phones or figuring out what to do (once
they've learned that the hijackers have no intention of landing
the plane, much less making any demands). Greengrass has avoided
casting any stars -- in some cases (as with FAA Operations Manager
Ben Sliney, who gave the order to ground all aircraft) he has
cast real-life figures from that day as themselves -- but a few
semi-recognizable character actors, like Boston Legal's
Christian Clemenson and Sledge Hammer's David Rasche,
stick out a bit and disrupt the illusion.
I can say that United 93
has been done well -- with intelligence, compassion, efficiency
-- and yet still question whether it was worth doing. In form
it's little different from a television docudrama, and you don't
take anything away from it that you wouldn't get from an actual
documentary (there have been at least two) or from reading a
book. As noted, Greengrass has very little wriggle room to interpret
the events artistically or even emotionally. He does everything
the opposite of how the worst Hollywoodized account of Flight
93 you could imagine would do it, but I think he overcorrects
in the other direction. I prefer a film like 11'09"01,
an anthology in which eleven directors from different countries
were asked to make a short film (lasting exactly eleven minutes,
nine seconds, and one frame) in response to 9/11. Some succeeded,
some didn't, but all were highly personal in a way that
honored the multitude of feelings about that horrid day. United
93 isn't personal -- it's just business. It's all
business, tending monkishly to data and jargon and physical detail,
as if so afraid of offending left-wingers, right-wingers, the
many people who were involved in air-traffic control, the many
survivors of those aboard Flight 93, and God knows who else,
that it can barely breathe.
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