'United' They Stood, in Paul Greengrass' Astounding Docu-Drama!

Rating: 9/10 (8 September 2015)

11th September, 2001. United 93 should have been a routine flight from Newark to San Francisco with 44 people on board. Of course, shortly after takeoff, the passengers on the plane, and later, the world, learned that what happened that day was anything but routine. 4 of the 44 passengers that boarded the flight were extremist terrorists who were out to hijack the flight with a view to crash it into the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. As two planes crash into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon, the citizens on board United 93 are left to decide whether to sit tight or try to take back the plane.
Taking no prisoners in the fictional sense, writer-director Paul Greengrass comes as close to uncovering what might have happened in the only hijacked plane not to hit its target on 9/11. By not wrapping it up in the American flag, demonizing the evildoers, canonizing the heroes, or focusing on their tearful telephone farewells to family and friends, Greengrass makes United 93 a gut-wrenching example of ordeal cinema. For it telescopes tightly on the tragedy, not as a rallying cry for the war on terror, but from the plausible perspective of 40, otherwise ordinary people simply responding to the shocking realization that their jet has just been hijacked. He doesn't pad the action with neat little back stories; we know no more about the passengers than they knew about each other on the last day of their lives. Using a hand-held camera, he crowds the screen with the essential gut rush of panic and confusion, whether in the plane or at the air traffic control centre, where many of the men who were there on the day play themselves.
The result is an astoundingly intense pressure-cooker docudrama which plays out - horribly - in almost real-time. With its nigh-on unbearable attention to mundane detail, this is reality that bites like a pit-bull; we watch as the passengers prepare to board at Gate 17, making final cellphone calls, politely avoiding eye-contact, small-talking in the hushed tones of the mildly tense air-commuter - all alongside the men who will ultimately kill them - and the feel of dread is so palpable as to make us nauseous.
United 93 does not offer the political or analytical dimension to the situationist spectacle Al-Qaida gave to the world that dwarfed anything from the conventional workshops of politics and culture. The movie just lives inside that stunned, astonished 90 minutes of horror between one epoch and the next. But in doing so, Paul Greengrass creates a blazingly powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. A chillingly profound profile in courage of forty strangers who bonded under incomprehensible circumstances to face an unspeakable evil!