They came.... but could we?

Rating: 9/10 (15 April 2007)

This astonishingly powerful movie gives us as close to a documentary view of the real-time unfolding of 9/11 as anyone will likely ever be able to get.
I had initially resisted seeing United 93, remembering the actual day of 9/11 far too well to 'need' the reminder of this movie. But I hesitatingly relented. I was right to give in.
United 93 is not "enjoyable". Nor is it "entertaining". It is unexpectedly, almost overwhelmingly real and sometimes difficult to watch. The R-rating is deserved for scenes that depict with distressing realism the raw violence and coarse, cold malevolence of the murderers on board. But far from embellishing the unknown or exaggerating the more 'photogenic' recorded details, this account of the last stolen flight of 9/11 succeeds in its brilliantly understated, and fundamentally truthful, handover to the audience of what simply happened, and how it happened between 8am and 10am on 9/11/2001. In a way that those of us who watched from the outside would never have quite understood, United 93 displays the confusion, anger, immobility and infuriating false-positives that resulted when expert air traffic controllers and soldiers were caught flat-footed trying to detect the few actually hijacked airliners in a dizzying electronic waterfall of 4,000 simultaneous flights moving across America.
It also displays shocked professionals who traversed their emotions to tackle some of the toughest moral and tactical calls imaginable, all with the goal of saving innocent life. Perhaps as a contrast, we never see the political leaders who are ostensibly supposed to manage such a crisis, only hearing of them remotely as military officers urgently try to contact the President and then anybody who might have the authority to let them stop the now-hostile planes.
United 93 also avoids taking a smooth and easy way out by trying to ignore or muffle the Islamic religious commitments and motives of the terrorists. On the contrary, the film explores this element of contemporary terrorism unflinchingly. Along with their combination of anxiety, hesitation, and astonishing malice, the hijackers' urgently-intoned Muslim prayers and Arabic entreaties add valuable emotional and human realism, while introducing the audience to the ideological anchoring that gave them the mental strength and clarity of purpose to terminate their own lives for the purpose of destroying others'.
The surprisingly rapid awareness and response of the passengers and crew might seem almost artificially accelerated...until you realize that the passengers on United 93 actually DID respond with the amazing speed and flexibility that the movie depicts. The incredibly textured and human reactions of the diverse group of fliers on board could be the centerpiece of a textbook of sociology--and also forces viewers to consider whether they have the mental agility, freedom of thought and passionate moral commitment to dismiss a comforting framework of naiveté -- "let's just do what they say..." -- and respond instead with the same courage and speed generated by this unexpected brotherhood of strangers, as courageous and devoted as any unit of soldiers, who, one begins to feel, were led by destiny to fly and fight together. "They're coming!" yells one of the terrorists as the unexpected response begins. And come they did... but would we? United 93 begins as a prosaic Everyflight that transitions, with amazing speed, into a dazzling example of human bravery, shared mission and a burning devotion to the good.
The brilliantly-filmed conclusion of the movie leaves you with an aching, rending sense of loss and justice denied--but also with an awareness that nobody else but those passengers was able to make the critical difference that morning. United 93 may well become the sine qua non of dramatic interpretations of 9/11. It deserves to.