United 93 (2006)

I had a hard time relating to Paul Greengrass's United 93. It's a very tragic story based on real events. My overall impression is that the film doesn't quite know what to do with itself. Is it to be a project of re-enactment (some of the people in the film play themselves)? Is it to reveal some specific angle of the events of 9/11? Is it an attempt to honor the victims? The film is built around the idea of real time. This creates a sense of intensity, anxious anticipation and fear and dread from the beginning onwards. We see tired passengers boarding the plane in the spirit of routine, and we see people respond with chock at the news of the WTC plane crash. We all know what will happen. Helpless, we watch the plane being hijacked. Because of the strict set-up of the film, it is a strange complaint I make when I say that I am unsure where the film is going. Perhaps a better way to state my hesitation is that I don't know how to watch it. Greengrass abstains from promulgating a heroic account of some specific people while demonizing others. It's not that kind of film. We know extremely little about the character and I agree that this is how it must be in this case. Apart from following the passengers and the hijackers, Greengrass takes us to the National Air Traffic Cotnrol center, along with the military and airports. The staff at all these places has been rendered helpless. They become aware of the planes crashing into the WTC towars and they are tracking some suspicious activity in the air. Some planes have departed from their routes but are soon nowhere to be found.

My hesitation stems from how all of these events are framed. The film starts with the soon-to-be-hijackers deeply focused on prayer. Later on in the film, we see many scenes accounting for the resistance of the Americans on board the plane. I cannot help repressing the feeling that Greengrass wants to deliver a comment on terrorists vs. Americans, the religious Muslims versus the brave Americans on the plane. At the same time, this critique seems unfair, given the simplicity and lack of overt political speech-making and conclusions. A very important aspect of United 93 is the panic and the confusion it investigates. People in the military and the administration are reduced into onlookers. There is something about the shift of focus from the plane to the control rooms and offices that doesn't quite work. More and more questions abound, tensions is built up, but artistically, this film loses the grip.

As heartbreaking as this film is, I am still haunted by the question: what was the purpose with the film? What does it mean to make a movie in the spirit of reverence, what kind of requirements does that perspective face up to? What does the film show? What does it mean to keep viewers encapsulated within the horrible moment, and where the point is to experience the 'real time' of those moments? This is not articulated critique, more open, philosophical questions about film as an act of remembrance and experience. There is no such thing as memorial itself, no pure 'never forget'. Somehow, I never get my head around what sense of memory, or re-enactment, United 93 gets at. At some moments, I am even afraid that the film takes us on the kind of journey that in the midst of frenzy and the sense of inevitability risks losing the acuteness of precisely that question.