Hard to 'dislike'

Rating: 6/10 (12 September 2012)

An morbidly exact reenactment of the famed United 93 flight, which crash-landed in a field on September 11th and thus failing to reach the target point. By way of story memories of proceedings are still strongly etched in the minds of most of humanity, even though specific details are unknown. Paul Greengrass attempts to bring forth these details presenting a real time movie of occurrences which took place that day.
With great focus on detail and language, the story shifts between control centres across the country and passengers of the doomed plane. Dialogues are painstakingly realistic, even professional lingo is used during conversations between air control personnel. Deeply essential to this realism is the all-engulfing feeling of utter chaos (enhanced by a shaky lens), giving an evocative understanding of how surprised and unprepared officials were to the attacks reacting in confusion and emotions to a situation outside their guidebooks. "United 93" goes to great length to present a matter-of-fact portrayal showing the fright, hopelessness, acceptance of inevitability and then the fatal moment of bravery. Characters aren't really presented or portrayed, their actions in response to the situation they were in are more important, while the rest is fittingly ignored (out of reverence to the victims).
With such a picture brought about so soon after the attacks the movie holds a large amount of reverence to (most) victims, one can help but question the necessity of making such a movie. Ultimately a documentary style re-enactment in true cinema verite style brings no commentary to the disaster and while it causes several moments of gut-wrenching honesty, can anything ever really overshadow the feelings that everyone had on that fateful day? Do we really need to film it and see it in-depth to accept the tragedy? Even though mostly tasteful, reverential and with a required subtlety I couldn't help but question necessity. Essentially a movie that in honour of victims is hard to be disliked, but I couldn't help but question how exploitive a movie like this is...
One asinine no-no by the filmmakers is the much talked about presentation of a German passenger in negative light, even though there are no suggestions that he ever went against the remainder of the passengers giving it a despicable anti-European touch, which shockingly and inappropriately disgusts.