A history lesson not for the feint of heart

Rating: 8/10 (3 June 2006)

Director Paul Greengrass utilizes a variety of tactics to bring to life the story of the high jacked airplane. Most of these are visible to the trained eye or audible to the trained ear. United 93 has a goal that revolves around setting up a recreation of the doomed plane and striving for accuracy.
Most of the film takes place within one of two settings: inside United 93 and inside the buildings of air traffic controllers and other government officials. There is no outside world. We don't see panicking people fleeing wreckage. We don't see the news crews gathering a story. What we get is intended to be an inside look at the process of trying to overtake a plane in control of terrorists, and so the fat is cut. We see that officials get news from CNN faster than they can spread the word amongst their own division.
Taking the audience inside the plane and the control rooms, proves to be a chaotic scenario. The camera is constantly jarred. Many times out of focus or out right grainy, images shake across the screen. This runs in contrast to actually being within a real life plane; as the human eye has the capacity to focus and never delivers a grainy image. The constant bobbing of the camera works to break the traditional Hollywood usage of tripods; but again in actuality our heads keep images rather stable.
The pre-September 11th mindset of Americans is summoned up in one seen. Prior to the knowledge of high jackings, an air traffic controller hears something barely audible in the background of a radio message. He then motions for his boss and says, "I heard something, it's not American something foreign." So reassuring it is that our air traffic controllers can identify the language of American with such ease. It is with this representative anecdote that Greengrass constructs a film that takes place in a close-minded America.
Dialogue aboard the protagonist plane, prior to the power exchange and inherit struggle, is contrasting. American passengers speak only of what they plan on doing after the flight lands. They have no worries about the present, only those of what a great time each will have at a camping destination. Each American passenger is living in the future and not the present. By contrast the terrorists aboard the plan are strategizing, and looking for the right moment to strike. This interesting construction of scenes aboard the plan lead us to believe that Americans were or still are oblivious to the present and what is taking place around them.
United 93 is a reconstruction of what possibly happened aboard said aircraft, and as such the last ditch effort of the passengers to seize control of their flight is created by the mind of Greengrass. We cannot know simply by archive phone calls alone, how the passengers went about fighting back. What Greengrass gives the audience is a struggle that is based in reality with the laws of physics applicable. There are no flashy moves or tricks, just the wielding of common items and screams of panic. The plane's final spiral into the Earth is viewed from within the plane; taking the audience into an unsettling nosedive similar to the feeling of viewing a roller coaster in first person perspective. This is fitting as the movie as a whole is told from the view of being there, whether that be in the plane, behind an air traffic controller, or in an Air Force base.