To Watch This Movie Is to Be Met Head-On BY the Miserable Anarchic Actuality of September 11, 2001.

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2008)

The reason Paul Greengrass's intensely unsettling docudrama is so potent and effective is because it does not play as if to know that any time has gone by since any given second of the unspeakable events of 9/11. The entire film, every facet, exists on screen in the most immediately present tense. The dialogue, which is generally improvised based on rehearsals Greengrass held with the cast, is anchored in interviews in the flesh between actors and families of those they play. Hardly of the passengers in the film are alluded to in any manner by their names, a touch gives light to the alliance rather than any distinct gallantry.
This momentous cultural, artistic and historical achievement makes a measured endeavor to steer clear of not only name actors, but actors with whom we are really even very facially familiar. In a sense, the film takes more chances as a narrative than it does as a dramatization of 9/11, because it makes no effort to depict the passengers or terrorists with exposition or backstory. In most movies about ill-fated journeys, we meet a handful significant characters like the selfish businessman, the quiet, surprisingly heroic man with a skeleton in the closet. What we discern about the passengers on United 93 is just what we would know if we had been on the plane and sitting near them: Nil save for one or two fine points of physical appearance.
Screen time aboard the plane interchange with time spent inside the National Air Traffic Control Center, airport towers, air traffic stations, and a military room. Here, too, there are no histories, but experts thinking and communicating in the immediate. Numerous of them played by the actual people involved, they have an unprecedented expertise of jargon and courses of action. When the controllers see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center, they flinch with disbelief and terror, and that instant in the film feels as real as it felt to me on that universally eery day, no matter how normal it was in terms of my own routine and everyone else's in spite of all the cataclysmic new chapter of history building in the background of the day.
This gut-wrenching masterpiece of tension is supremely overpowering because it gives a picture of all of its characters as just anyone shut into an inevitable advance toward the end. Oscar-nominated British director Greengrass's disturbing docudrama includes no politics. No speculation. No private dialogue between anyone on screen, and so of course there aren't any jingoistic pro-America monologues. The film pathologically avoids the big picture.
We watch United 93 as the passengers and crew get on the plane and it gets ready to depart. Very soon, the first plane is engulfed by the ominous flames in the World Trade Center. Living in that flash, we share the bewilderment of the air traffic controllers. There is a thin silhouette of assorted procedures that come into focus, deliberately without expansion or analysis. I am one of the many who see this film and recall the now infamous scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 in which George W. Bush sat inert in a kindergarten classroom in Florida for seven minutes after being informed of the attack. We see the reality that he's informed, so what was he waiting for? This, a taut, spare dissolution of its events' primordial cognizance does not reach for that understanding, because the people on the screen do not have the vista of retrospection.
The third act of the film is some of the most harrowing cinema I've experienced since the first time I saw Requiem For a Dream years ago, as the last twenty minutes concentrates on the despair aboard United 93, when the hijackers have taken over, hack flight attendants, slay the pilots and ostensibly have a bomb one click away, the passengers erratically overcome their fear and attack of mortality and bind to rush their victimizers, all having been reconstructed from the 33 telephone calls from the plane and from the cockpit voice recorder. Greengrass is bursting to be as truthful and precise as possible. There is no fabricated showboating, no dramatized arguments among the passengers, no specific champions. The passengers are a horrified assembly of strangers. Even while these courageous passengers spend their last minutes fighting tooth and nail, we know nothing about them, none of the information about them which we can of course look up now. It could be us on the plane, petrified and alarmed.