Turbulent times
United 93
Dir Paul Greengrass
United 93 is an awkward, painful film to watch. You cannot help rooting for the good guys, as in any other action film: secretly believing that finally everything will be okay. But the unavoidable awareness of what will at last happen continually bursts this time and again. The whole experience of the film is counterpointed by the impending tragic reality: it is a hopeless, wretched, powerless experience. That it has been made at all is remarkable.
A lot of the footage captured of 9/11 has never been shown, and many networks refuse to rebroadcast any of it at all. But here is a film that takes us through everything on that fourth hijacked plane: the pleasant early morning, the flight that starts normally, the seizing of the plane, the awful realisation — as text messages and phone calls start reaching the phones of passengers — that they are sat aboard what has become a giant missile.
And then the first battle in the war on terror: the passengers fighting back. Seeing all this — all this that has previously only been hinted at or described — is such a bald shock to the senses that noticing the excellence of the production is almost an accidental afterthought, and feels a little tawdry. This is partly also because director Paul Greengrass so successfully contrives a persuasive sense of veracity. There are no actors you will recognise.
Indeed several characters are played by people actually involved in the events. The camera is perfectly in sync with the audience’s restless, anxious curiosity, searching and flicking about at the pace of human thought, and not in an overly stylised fashion. The dialogue has all of the ineloquence of genuine speech. This film is tragic but it is not cathartic. Aristotle, for all his wisdom, failed to foresee the era of fundamentalism. This is a film to enrage you.
Thankfully it does not skew the events in any particular way: it simply restates them, and causes us to revaluate our positions. It is a reminder not only of the heroism of the passengers aboard flight 93, but a provocation to equal moral clarity and action. All the years of accumulated analysis and satire have deadened the events of that day. Here they are back again — like lightening out of a clear sky.
1st Jun 2006