Horrifically fresh

Rating: 9/10 (12 September 2010)

Director Paul Greengrass has made the unlikely transition from making worthy Birth docu-dramas to frenetic Hollywood blockbusters; lying somewhere in between is this film about the terrorist attack on America in 2001, based on a combination of known fact and plausible interpolation. Potentially, a story of hijacked aircraft crashing faces some of the problems that affected attempts to make a movie about another iconic, era-defining human tragedy, the sinking of the Titantic 90 years earlier: for sure, it was a huge event in world history, but the basic narrative is apparently quite dull: innocent people board a transport of some description, something terrible happens and a lot of death follows. This led to James Cameron, in his film about the epic ship, creating a preposterous and melodramatic back story for his travellers, one that attempted to be large enough to actually contain the sinking of the boat within it. Greengrass thankfully does nothing of the sort here, and there are actually several good reasons why his doesn't need to. Firstly, this drama occurred during the era of modern communications; these have given us the detail that can only be speculated about in the case of the Titanic, and moreover, how this information came to be communicated is a story in itself, whose conclusion is that even the might of the United States military is curiously impotent in the face of a wholly unexpected but immediate threat. Next, there's a natural story that isn't just one of accidental death, in the efforts of passengers on United flight 93 to resist their hijackers (hence the title of this film, although much of this movie is actually set in the air traffic and military command centres, as Greengrass sets his central tale in just the right amount of context). There's also the immediacy of the events, which gives them a horrific charge in a way a story of people who would be dead by now in any case cannot; not only do we still remember the day, it took place in what is still essentially our world. Only when the passengers gather up scissors to prepare a counter attack does it briefly feel like a piece of history. Personally, I find Greengrass's 'Bourne' films somewhat overcooked; but here he gets everything just right. The sad thing is that none of the people he pays tribute here survived to be acknowledged for their bravery, which although it did not save themselves, certainly saved others.