Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
United 93 takes perfect approach to tough landing
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
Exploitative. Sleazesational. Patriotic mush. Those who expected United 93—about the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on September 11—to be any or all of the above don’t know the pilot’s record.In The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, director Paul Greengrass docudramatized the racist murder of a black teenager in London and the incompetent police investigation that followed. Then he made Bloody Sunday, about the killing of civil rights protest marchers in 1972 Belfast, and went on to helm The Bourne Supremacy, an edgy thriller drenched in grief. The Englishman uses large casts of known and unknown actors, who are shot with a handheld camera in order to create gritty, improvised scenes of public violence and private anguish.
United 93 is little different in its democracy—some people play themselves; others are unknown actors—but its subject is more controversial. September 11, 2001 was an eerie moment of collective trauma on this continent. Most people remember where they were when they heard the news, and pundits mark the day as a historical tipping-point to the war on terror.
So why make a film that re-traumatizes, re-shocks and re-chills? The story can’t help but demonize Muslims, if only because the only Muslims here are the hijackers. The opening scene shows them preparing and praying before they leave their hotel room and go to Newark Airport. Untranslated Arabic is uttered in voiceover as a camera coasts over New York City.
But after this quasi-mythic, grandiose opening, United 93 pulls back, focusing on the everyday. Greengrass’s interpretation may be most necessary as a visceral reminder of the gut-churning mundanity of the hijackings, where four scared but driven men took over a plane with a few knives and a fake bomb but couldn’t fight off a swarm of horrified and determined passengers.
The film snatches chit-chat between stewardesses, the shop talk of air traffic controllers, and an easygoing conversation between pilots. The camera roves relentlessly among air traffic control centres and up and down the sunlit cabin of the plane as a sense of urgency settles in; then the suddenness of violence dissipates into shock.
The passengers hunch into their seats, some whispering “I love you” to friends and family on seatphones, others murmuring the breaking news of two planes hitting the World Trade Center, as a bubbling, sickening sense of panic boils into chaos and tragedy. Passengers and hijackers pray as death looms.
If Hollywood can entertain us with death in action films, then United 93 can immerse us in a tragedy, full of true shock and awe. At a time of polarized, us-versus-them mentalities, this film may just confirm people’s preconceptions.
But Greengrass’s work suggests that the germ of the world’s new “war” was nothing but a mass-murdering crime full of desperation and panic, with information overload and communication breakdowns leading to a paralyzed response from the powers that be.
United 93 shows that the blind war on terror, then and now, has been about bombast, symbolism and zealous overreaction, with both sides turning their fears and terrors into hatred for a scapegoated enemy. V
Now playing
United 93
Written & directed by Paul Greengrass
Starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson,
Gary Commock