Fear of Flying
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie that nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that multiplex hordes eagerly await the arrival of this bummer blockbuster. New York City theaters pulled an early trailer containing scenes of the World Trade Center towers with their gaping, smoke-spewing wounds. But they are unavoidable in the film: Images of the smoldering towers broadcast by CNN loom like ghosts over the shoulders of military men and air-traffic controllers throughout. United 93 wants you to do more than remember — it wants you to remember how you felt.
Universal, which is releasing the movie, and writer-director Paul Greengrass have said and done all the right things to placate those who accuse them of ripping at fresh wounds. They’ve emphasized the OK given by the families of those killed on that flight; Greengrass interviewed most of them at length, and talked to members of the 9/11 Commission and flight controllers who worked that day. Universal promised to donate 10 percent of opening-week receipts to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund. They’ve even cast in central roles real United pilots and flight attendants and some of the air-traffic controllers who were working that morning, bringing to this work of fiction a harrowing degree of verisimilitude that only ups the ante. Imagine reliving that morning over and over, take after torturous take, all for the sake of getting a bad thing just right.
Never mind that this moment has already been docudramatized for television, for A&E’s overwrought Flight 93, the highest-rated show in the cable network’s history. Those who will forever view United 93 as a case of too much way too soon won’t be placated by sincere gestures. They are right to say that none of us needs to be told again what happened that day; we’re reminded of it each time George W. Bush invokes the date to explain or excuse his actions since then. But that is precisely why United 93 needs to be seen: Even as a work of fiction, it wrests from politicians’ sweaty hands the cynical battle cry that date has become and shrinks September 11 to a human-sized tragedy. Those killed in the planes and in the towers and in the Pentagon are eulogized here — mourned over, cried for, at last considered.
The film begins at a leisurely pace, with the hectic but mundane grind of the day-to-day. Passengers, many of them character actors whose faces are as familiar as their names are not, place cell-phone calls to colleagues and family members. Even their eventual attempt to take control of the plane after the hijacking is portrayed as something prosaic: the inevitable last gasp of the desperate and doomed. It’s to Greengrass’ credit that he does not underscore such things as Todd Beamer’s “Let’s roll!” proclamation, which is barely even heard here. It was just something said, two words only later mythologized by those who needed to latch onto such heroism to cope with such villainy.
Greengrass, who specializes in close-quarters thrills (The Bourne Supremacy) and real-life terror (Bloody Sunday), is a visceral filmmaker; you feel his stuff in your guts. But he does not stay aboard Flight 93 for the entirety of the movie: He cuts back and forth among various air-traffic-control centers and military command posts, capturing snippets of benign chitchats that turn into frantic, helpless wails as planes begin falling from the sky. United 93 makes irrelevant the in-the-works adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report; Greengrass is as indignant toward panicked and absent government officials as he is respectful of the passengers aboard Flight 93. That, ultimately, is what makes this the perfect movie: You will feel something during every single second of it — dread, fear, anger, hate, hope and, most of all, grief, which is all anyone can ask of an endeavor such as this.
