United 93 (2006)

IMDb helpfully listed 50 movies with (vaguely) patriotic American themes for the 4th of July. As usual for cinematic lists, I'd seen most and was not interested in most of the rest. I considered Clear and Present Danger, but it sounds pretty run-of-the-mill and I'd seen Patriot Games last year. Besides, U93 is about a half-hour shorter.

In truth, it could've stood to shave off another half-hour. The story of the one American plane that got hijacked on 9/11 but hit only the ground starts with a peek at the hijackers getting ready and then spends a bit too long on the regular passengers getting ready. To anyone who's flown commercially before, it's an utterly familiar scene. Maybe we're supposed to learn to relate strongly to the ordinary people, but my attention wandered as easily as if I were on a plane myself. It takes about 17 minutes for a sense of conflict to kick in, and when it does, it's not on the plane.

A good chunk of the run time takes place in air traffic control and other land-based stations. It is in those scenes that we first learn of the gradual awareness of things going wrong with one flight after another. Characters in the spotlight belatedly notice smoke rising from one of the Twin Towers; later they see the second crash from too far away to hear. Under most circumstances, we would not call this good filmmaking. I'm fine with quiet drama, but when something clearly exciting is happening elsewhere, I feel shortchanged.

Only after the Pentagon crash, maybe halfway through the story, do the United 93 hijackers agree to stop waiting to make their move. Now we finally get some interesting details that aren't common knowledge (and probably didn't happen exactly that way in real life). Apparently, quite a few passengers managed to place quietly distressed phone calls without their watchers noticing. More than that, we can project ourselves and people we know onto the passengers, speculating how we might behave under the circumstances. I mentioned earlier my interest in hostage movies; this one stands out in part because the takers have no intention of letting anyone live.

It's clear that director Paul Greengrass wanted credibility more than anything else. Fresh off The Bourne Supremacy, he could easily have gotten a big-name cast, but he chose relative nobodies so as not to pull us out of the experience with recognition. No characters really stand out from the rest, either. The dialog flows with unusually realistic roughness, at least in English; we get subtitles for the hijackers only now and then, possibly just telling us what we need to know and otherwise leaving us in the dark like the hostages.

Ultimately, this kind of movie is easier to respect than to enjoy. We all go in knowing the gist of what happened, and it isn't pretty. To call it bittersweet is a stretch. Maybe the studio would have done better to wait much longer than five years after the events. As it stands, we might question the point: Are we communing on the tragedy to good effect, emotionally and socially, or just lining Hollywood pockets? Of course, if I gave priority to that line of thought on a regular basis, I wouldn't have this blog.

You can figure out for yourself whether you care to see something deftly done yet morbidly predictable by necessity. For my part, I'll consider Clear and Present Danger next year.