Sandra's note: I wrote this thing months ago (back in August of last year) and just never got around to posting it. So if things are bit dated, that's why. I figured, however, that my opinions are timeless.
The movie starts. Some Arab dudes flash up on the screen for a minute or two before I am shown shots of a busy interstate and the bustling Newark airport. A mounting dread fills me the more I watch, because even if you don't know by now that I was watching "United 93," I did. And I knew what was going to happen already.
Why did I come see this movie?
For those of you who do not know, United 93 is about the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside on September 11, 2001 because the passengers attempted to take over the plane from the hijackers. The plane is speculated to have been headed for the Capitol or the White House (the movie says the Capitol). Naturally, a lot of the movie is pure speculation, because everyone who would be able to tell us what happened on the flight is dead. But a lot of those people made phone calls to friends and loved ones while the hijackers were in control of the plane, and so the screenwriter pieced together a story with those phone calls and then filled in the holes. My worry going into this movie was that it would not be clear that most of the script was made up. Based on real events and real people, yes, but other than a few telephone conversations five years ago and profiles of passengers given by the people who loved them, this movie is fiction. I was afraid that viewers would come out thinking they knew what really happened. I was afraid that a bunch of cheap, Hollywood sentimental effects were going to turn a national tragedy into nothing more than a moneymaker.
There were no famous actors. I thought I recognized one, an old lady from a sitcom that hasn't been on in years. The rest were regular-looking people, and some of the airport staff had been actual airport staff. No one was especially attractive or well-spoken. There was no heart-wrenching music to signify the dramatic scenes and the big lines, and there really were no big lines. People stuttered and mispoke. The camera work was shaky, as if it were documentary footage. From the moment the passengers got on the plane, the movie was in real-time. Though the terrorists were speaking Arabic, the subtitles were scant. For the most part, the viewer did not need to know exactly what they said. Besides, the passengers surely couldn't tell.
The really horrifying part of the movie was before the hijacking. It was the fact that you went into the movie and watched it, knowing what was going to happen. You watched all the regular-looking people carrying luggage and checking their tickets and calling people on their cell phones while they waited in the airport. You watched them do all these normal things that you've done before and will do again, the things that are just part of air travel. But at the same time, you know the ending. Once the terrorists were taking over and everything stopped seeming so familiar and routine, it was actually a relief, and I stopped considering walking out altogether.
One of the best things about this movie is how the terrorists were portrayed. They were not vicious and they were not lunatics. Granted, they did kill a lot of innocent people, but they were definitely shown as people who saw the killings as unavoidable given the fact that they had a higher calling. It was all part of a war to them. They bore the passengers no malice. The moviemakers did not show them as cruel, and I think that was a smart move. We have enough hatred. In fact, the terrorists looked like normal people, maybe with thick dark hair and light olive skin, but just regular folks you might see anywhere. And the most striking thing was that they were scared, they were actually nervous, like anyone would be on a mission to martyrdom.
The most gripping part of the movie was a simple scene before the passengers decided to fight back, when they knew they were probably going to die but just had to sit there and wait for it. From the point of the takeover to the time of the crash was about half an hour. Things are kinda settled, the situation has sort of sunk in. The terrorists are in control, but they are nervous because they still have some time before they reach the target. They're praying at the same time, though to themselves in some language that I do not speak. There are no subtitles. The passengers are reciting the Lord's Prayer to themselves as well, the same prayer but not together. It's a powerful sequence of images, the interweaving of the pleas to Allah and the Christian God. I wanted to scream out at the screen, "We've obviously got some things in common - can't we work something out?"
The bottom line is this: if this movie had to be made, the one I watched was a pretty good one. I don't think the movie needed to be made at all; 9/11 wasn't even five years ago. But the screenwriter and the director and the cinematographer and everyone else on the movie could have taken a lot of terrible wrong turns, and they didn't. They were not trying to glorify anything.
I watched this movie alone and wished that I had not. There's no point in wishing I hadn't even seen it, because I know I would have eventually watched it out of pure curiosity. But I wish that someone had watched it with me, so that I could talk about it. I even walked out of the theatre and to my car slowly so as to overhear the conversation of some of those who had been in the theatre with me. One man said, "Well, it sorta puts things in perspective, doesn't it?" I wanted to turn around and say, "I'm sorry, could you be more generic, please?" I was irritated at the man for making such a trite comment just to have something to say. The woman who was with him made a better point, saying that the passengers had not rushed the cockpit to crash the plane, but to save it from crashing at all. Admittedly, that is a thought that hadn't occurred to me. The passengers of United 93 have been lauded as heroes, for their bold statement "We're not going down like this." Maybe their statement was "We're not going down at all."
Here's what I thought. Because of all the phone calls to people on the ground, the passengers knew what was up. They knew about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and so they knew that they were not hostages. It was clear to them that they were bound for another building. And so what they did makes more sense now. They were not trying to be heroes or symbols of the American spirit. They were just trying to survive. I wonder if the passengers of the other flights might not have reacted the same way with the same information. If they knew it was either definitely die or fight back and still maybe die they might have opted to fight back, too.
I'm trying to figure out the point of this movie. It wasn't made to shock you, though I had been afraid that there would be graphic violence. However, the cinematography was so shaky that nothing was really seen vividly. I imagine that the views were what you would see had you been on the plane - everything happened too fast that afterwards, you weren't even sure what really went on. It didn't glorify the passengers as heroes, but merely showed people choosing survival. It didn't demonize the terrorists - they were people, too. It wasn't a patriotic movie, either; there were no stupid catchphrases about the American way or whatever. Maybe the point was to just tell a powerful story.
I'm not particularly recommending this movie. If you feel uncomfortable seeing it, then don't. It's not easy to watch, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to ever watch it again. I hear there's another 9/11 movie coming out, one that, based on the trailers, promises to have swelling music and tragic speeches. There's no shortage of tragedy movies based on actual events: Titanic, Pearl Harbor, etc. That sort of movie seems a mockery of what really happened, just an obvious attempt to capitalize off a horrific event without bothering to pay much respect to the facts or the people whose lives were altered forever. Maybe you could make a 9/11 movie like that in 50 or 100 years, but now? Too soon.
One quibble: there was a foreign passenger (German, I think?) who tried to talk the other passengers out of rushing the cabin, who was in favor of staying calm and seeing how things turned out. There was an actual foreign man on the plane, but there was never any evidence of this passenger doing anything of the sort. I suppose the filmmakers felt it would be unrealistic to suppose that everyone would be in favor of fighting back and so wanted to have someone show disagreement to add to the realism. Then they were faced with the dilemma of who to use: use one of the Americans, and you're definitely going to piss off the victim's family. So while I understand this problem, the decision to use the foreign passenger seemed kind of...I dunno, petty.
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