Wednesday, January 31, 2007

United 93 (2006)

Directed by Paul Greengrass

United 93 is a sad, gripping retelling of some of the events on 9/11/01, when a secretive group of terrorists managed to perpetrate a startlingly effective attack on the U.S.

Since we know the story all too well, the movie takes on the feeling I get when watching films about the Titanic: I know the ship’s going to sink, so the only novelty is seeing exactly how it does, and the affect it has on the passengers and crew and others.

This movie feels as if it were created by a bunch of film students with handheld cameras who just happened to be situated in critical spots around the country and in the air as the events on that sad day unfolded.

We see the FAA national operations center, the air traffic control centers that interacted with flight 93 and the other doomed aircraft, the military readiness center, and the passengers and crew and terrorists on flight 93.

The moviemakers made an excellent choice not to include any recognizable stars or celebrities in this movie. There are no melodramatics and no histrionics; star power does not fuel this vehicle. Instead, we see ordinary people going about their ordinary activities, when suddenly they are confronted with a profound disconnect. Their assumptions and expectations are totally wrong, and the correct version of the truth is almost incomprehensible to them.

The scenes on flight 93 feel completely authentic. This flight is filled with our family and friends and neighbors; that is, with everyone we’ve ever shared an airline flight with. After the terrorist takeover of the plane, the passengers are confused, afraid, and disorganized. Some think they should just cooperate and they’ll be fine. The flight attendants are huddled at the back of the plane without a clue to exactly what’s going on in the cockpit.

Over time, passengers using cell phones start to piece together the sketchy information they’re getting, until they know what’s happening, They decide they must assault the terrorists and stop them from carrying out their plan. Their hurried planning feels totally real, with everyone talking at once and quickly trying to think through their plan.

That 19 determined, angry, fanatical young men could carry out a plot to ram civilian airliners into buildings was unimaginable to the people depicted in the movie. Lending even more truthfulness to this drama, the man running the FAA national operations center on 9/11 plays himself, along with other air traffic controllers and FAA workers. If the film has any heroes (other than the desperate passengers on flight 93 who try to fight back), it is this head of the FAA, Ben Sliney, who, seeing the emerging pattern of attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, makes the enormous (and correct) decision to shut down U.S. airspace to all planes.

The film showed the U.S. military as totally unprepared for the unexpected. Their lines of communication with the FAA were laughable, and their response was uncoordinated and ineffective. Jets fighter scrambled to meet the threat and then flew off away from their intended targets, or they didn’t have any weapons or bullets. The president’s authority was needed for the military to shoot down hijacked planes, and he was nowhere to be found.

Both for the FAA and the military, their most accurate source of information was not the billions of dollars of equipment they possessed, or their information networks, or their procedures and rules of engagement as handled by thousands of skilled, trained personnel. It was CNN.

There was absolute silence in the theater where I saw this film when it ended. This movie shows us exactly how it was (in the FAA national operations center and arguably in the military) that day, and offers a convincing view of how it might have been had we had been a passenger on one of those doomed flights. It further challenges us to consider how we might have reacted had we been on United 93.

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