'United 93' discussed

Do we need 'United 93', Paul Greengrass's new film about 9/11? After seeing it, Ben Walters has strong doubts.

May  2 2006

When 'United 93' – British director Paul Greengrass's documentary-style feature about the 9/11 flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field – was announced, the American media response was wary. Later, the trailer was pulled from New York theatres amid audience protests that it was 'too soon'. Now that the movie has finally premiered, at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, the response has been cautiously positive, at least among critics: Variety found it 'taut, visceral and predictably gut-wrenching', while the Village Voice maintained that 'the film nobody wants to see is worth seeing'.

But having watched it, I'm not so sure. The positive reaction is not too surprising given the lengths to which the filmmakers have gone to stave off any whiff of exploitation: they assiduously courted the cooperation of the relatives of those killed and allowed them substantial participation; others involved in the events also contributed (Federal Aviation Administration operations manager Ben Sliney, whose first day on the job was September 11, even plays himself); and Universal Pictures has announced it will donate some of the box office to the flight's memorial fund. And by casting unknowns and deploying his signature quasi-vérité aesthetic, Greengrass offers a sober, unflinching telling of the awful tale that avoids both sentimentality and sensationalism.

Playing out roughly in real time, the film opens with the sound of prayer as the four hijackers prepare themselves and leave their hotels. We see the banal chitchat of passengers and crew as they arrive at the airport, and the beginning of the day for those manning the FAA headquarters and several other aviation control centres, including a military base in upstate New York. (Around half the film takes place off the plane itself.)

As news of one, then multiple possible hijackings filters uncertainly up the communications network, flight UA93 completes boarding. When its door is sealed closed, it can’t help but seem to us like a tomb, no matter that its inhabitants remain animated.

The film works hard to put the audience in the situation it describes, especially through sound: the score pounds low like a heartbeat and the ramped-up ambient bass makes the cinema an extension of the cabin, especially during the sickening lurches that signify the final struggle for control. As the passengers begin to realise the significance of their situation, their fear turns not so much to heroism as to a determination not to die without trying to live.

If there is an attempt to celebrate those onboard, it lies in the contrast between their action and the inaction on the ground, where logistical confusion precludes an early response that might have prevented UA93 from ever taking off – a reminder, perhaps, that there are still questions to be answered about the official reaction to the unfolding events.

Yet if there's criticism implicit in this, it's levelled at the system as a whole rather than individual decisions made on the day; there’s no place for any consideration of the larger context of US defence strategy – nor, for that matter, of the motivations, however warped, that drove the terrorists. 'United 93' itself deals with events in the here-and-now, not their causes or consequences; its concerns are all tactical, not strategic. Which begs the question: what is it for?

There's undeniable value to sincere, well-researched reconstructions of terrible events whose truth has been clouded by confusion or self-serving 'approved' accounts; reconstructions like Greengrass's own 'Bloody Sunday' or the recent French TV production 'Nuit Noire' (about the effective massacre of Moroccans by the Paris police in 1961 – the events haunting Haneke's 'Hidden'). Even a film like Michael Winterbottom's 'The Road to Guantánamo', which is questionable on several terms, attempted to bring wider attention to an unfamiliar story of the war on terror. But in this case we're all too aware of what happened; 'United 93' will not challenge anyone's expectations in this regard, whatever their feelings about the project's conception.

So is it intended simply as a memorial to the dead? Apparently not: Greengrass has claimed that a close examination of such an event can reveal 'the DNA of our times'. But the 'real' aesthetic, however powerful, belies the fact that what we see here is almost entirely conjecture, however well-informed; and the film's self-imposed limits preclude the unravelling of its genetic strands, offering the anatomy of a murder rather than its evolutionary context. We know what to expect because we know the story, not because the film proposes an argument about the forces in motion that resulted in this crisis.

'United 93' might adopt a less individualistic approach than, say, Oliver Stone's forthcoming 'World Trade Center' – which reportedly focuses on two characters played by stars – yet its tight context remains a stumbling block: compare it to the expansive approach of Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin', another film about an onboard crisis of global consequence but one that locates it within a political and social context entirely lacking here.

In many ways, Greengrass's picture more closely resembles another film, one whose gallows humour shouldn't conceal the seriousness of its concerns: like 'United 93', Kubrick's 'Dr Strangelove' presents us with a world whose fate is weighed by confused men sealed away in the enclosed spaces of bunkers and aircraft – a world in which we witness the end of life as we know it with a calamitous final headlong plunge to the ground that offers no opportunity to look around.

'United 93' screens at the Cannes Film Festival this month and opens on June 2.

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