I didn't want to see this movie. Don't know what compelled me. But there I was. I'd never been so frightened in my life. I fidgeted nervously in my seat, panic boiling in my bones. Was I a rotten person? Was this morbid curiosity? I didn't think so. I prayed I didn't think so. Was there even a word to describe my motivation? I stood up. I sat down. Why was I here? What kind of repugnant, sick person did my parents raise? I looked around. Should I get up? Should I leave? I knew how this story ended. I saw it on the news, read every painful detail of the transcripts, discussed it with everyone. September 11, 2001, was a heart-twisting nightmare for this country, a cold, numb anguish. The world was changed. The world was fucked. Nothing mattered anymore. People were still filing in. I still wanted to run away. But here I was, almost five years later, trying to understand why I was willing to spend two-and-a-half hours of a Saturday morning helplessly watching, in mounting terror and dismay, unsuspecting strangers die on a plane.
Well, I understand now.
Look—I wish this movie had never been made. But only because I wish September 11 had never happened. I wish the World Trade Center were still a familiar part of the New York skyline. I wish that the passengers on all those flights had landed safely at their respective destinations and gone on with their lives. I wish I wasn't sitting in a crowded theater watching the dramatization of still-fresh events. I wish I outright hated the fucking thing, because then I could forget it. I could lessen its impact by denouncing it as tripe, crap, bullshit, heartless Hollywood exploitation. But I won't, because I can't. It'll be with me forever. I'll alternately love and hate it for the rest of my life, for the exact same reason: It wrecked me. It stripped me raw.
United 93 is indescribable. To even call it a movie is to deny its power. It is good, in the Biblical sense. Made by good people with good intentions, and that goodness, that compassion mixed with the need—hell, the moral obligation—to tell this story right. It works beyond the limitations of drama. It transcends skilled craftsmanship. Simply put, it is the best, most thoughtful use of the motion-picture medium ever. No one will top this. No one should try.
The secret of its power is simple: At no point does it feel like an assembled story softened by poetic license, but as horrific events unfolding organically, with its participants responding in a very human manner. There are no colorful archetypes; the passengers and crew of Flight 93 itself are so ordinary as to be invisible. They don't speak in movie dialogue but in the polite, meandering small talk shared between strangers and friends. There are no main characters. You really learn no names. The camera just floats curiously about, catching fragments where it can. Yet, despite the lack of conscious character development or an audience anchor, the cast's performances are so precise and so free of histrionics that they're immediately sympathetic. It's as if writer/director Paul Greengrass instinctively knows that we will like them, we will feel sympathy for them, because they're us. They don't need overwrought dramatic baggage. They're average Americans who rise on a clear morning for a flight to San Francisco. They all sit in the terminal at the Newark airport, cell phones locked to their ears, delivering calm goodbyes to loved ones and last-minute instructions to employees. They talk about the restaurants they'll visit when they get into town, the sights they'll see. All this information is relayed in an ocean of disconnected chatter—Altman unbound. A gregarious sort in his early 30s—who in any other motion picture would be the romantic lead—even arrives at the airport late, unshaven under a hat concealing morning hair, barely making the flight. Meanwhile, in another part of the terminal, four well-groomed men we met briefly at the beginning of the film wait anxiously to board, all with knowledge their fellow travelers—and the country at large—do not yet possess.
The passengers of Flight 93 are never presented in cinematic terms. They are heroes because they choose to be, out of both a sense of self-preservation (they want to live) and of human decency (they want others to live too). The moment where this choice is made is the only sequence in this film that I will examine in any detail, because I think this movie should be seen. Two terrorists have taken control of the cockpit, having killed the pilots, a flight attendant, and a passenger, who they senselessly stabbed repeatedly in the throat and stomach shortly after announcing their presence on the plane (his sole offense was sitting within convenient arm's reach; he was on his cell phone, oblivious to what was about to happen). The other two pace menacingly in the first-class aisle, blocking the cockpit door. One has a bomb strapped to his stomach; the other's armed with a small scalpel. By now the passengers have all learned that two planes have struck the World Trade Center in New York, one has crashed into the Pentagon in the nation's capitol, and they're quite certain that they too are aimed at a target somewhere on the East Coast. One man, red-eyed and vibrating with sweat-caked, adrenaline-fueled fear, turns to the young man—the late, leading-man arrival—behind him and whispers, "You know we've got to do something." The young man replies, confused and somewhat unwilling, "What?" And with that, a very primitive plot is hatched covertly in the flight attendants' quarters, with curious passengers becoming often-reluctant volunteers. (Meanwhile, the two terrorists realize that their captives are conspiring against them and are banging frantically against the cockpit door.) It doesn't go quite as planned—in real life, plots seldom do—but the job gets done in a final sequence (a breakneck melee, really, of colors, sounds, and shapes) that is equal parts desperate, feral, rabid, harrowing, disturbing, confusing, anarchic, brutal, ugly, blurry, savage, terrifying, horrifying, dizzying, hopeless, and then... silent.
We all have a tendency to assume that proper perspective is gained only after years of reflection and distance. I respectfully disagree. The effect of history should never know dulled edges, or succumb to layer upon layer of romantic embellishment. Its participants should never be subject to intellectual taxidermy, their blood and breath and soul sucked clean—cut neatly from the context of family and friends who must carry on without them—their lives stuffed fat with $14 metaphors, their humanity stripped by academic analysis. Many have claimed in outrage that it's much too soon for a movie like United 93, but would a filmmaker five, ten years from now treat the subject with as much respect for the truth, or would we have something akin to Pearl Harbor, where "a day that will live in infamy" is mere CGI set-dressing for a nickel-and-dime love story?
United 93's time is now. So we don't risk trivializing the events of 9/11. So we don't growl in exasperation when our grandkids innocently ask, "What's the significance of that day?" So we always remember it as it really was, in all its ugliness, confusion, and despair. And this is, most likely, as close an approximation as we'll ever get. As a consequence, it's a great movie the likes of which I hope to never see again.
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