Eerie, like a horror movie

Rating: 8/10 (30 April 2006)

Online Slate magazine has a pretty good write-up about this movie. (http://www.slate.com/id/2140690/) Except the author doesn't say that watching the events of 9/11 unfold is eerie. It is like watching that horrific day all over again with the clarity of a horror movie. We know what the bad guy is going to do next. We know the innocent, happy girl is going to make a mistake, and despite our inner admonishments and hands clutching the theater seats, sure enough, like an idiot, she opens the wrong door.
With horror movies, we have the frustrating benefit of foresight. The director lets us in on the secret. With 9/11, we have the wretched frustration of hindsight.
First there is the Discovery Channel's review of the 9/11 Commission Report, which found a damnable lack of foresight, intelligence co-operation and imagination in a defense system that already suffered multiple attacks from the same terrorist organization, including one previous attempt against the very same target! Then there is Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat. He details the extensive $400K, multi-team globalization project, which al Qaeda undertook to attack the towers, the Pentagon and the Capitol building.
In some respects, this is movie making at its best. Hand held video follows the terrorists through their daily prayers and preparations, nameless, faceless people board the plane amid scraps of conversations and phone calls. Air traffic control centers follow yellow markers on the screen. Bureaucrats shuffle papers and attend meetings. Then one plane is off the screen and nobody knows what is going on. Then another plane is off the air. United 93 taxis down the run-way, preparing for take-off. Four young Arabs sit quietly in first class.
Another plane is off the screen. The military is alerted. A plane hits the World Trade Center. The director is clinical about the timing and conversations of the events. His eye never wavers as the clock winds down to the inevitable. This isn't a roller-coaster. This is a grind.
Our government doesn't look bad. They just look woefully unprepared. The mother of one of serial killer Jeffery Dahmers' victims spoke in court. She said there was nothing wrong with her boy. Yet nothing, she said, prepares you for a monster like Dahmer.
So it was with the military and the air traffic control centers. Although Islamist extremists tried to bomb the WTC before and they successfully bombed the USS Cole, we never met a monster like bin Laden.
The director doesn't amplify the courage it took those soldiers of faith to dive head-long into an oblivion of structural steel. He juxtapositions the religious preparations of the terrorists with the last minute prayers of the doomed passengers.
And then it is over. You are left alone, in the dark, after a nightmare ride to death. The emptiness and the hollowness of their jihad inhibits you.
Unlike Tora, Tora, Tora or the first and second Pearl Harbor movies, after watching United 93, it is easy to see how the schemers and manipulators gave us the war we got. Neither side may be the moral right in this cultural war over globalization and scarce resources, but after watching this movie, you want war. You want justice and you want revenge. I am not sure the Afghanistan war alone would have satisfied our national appetite for revenge.