The power of 'less is more'

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2016)

Dramatisations of real-life events often fail because filmmakers somehow feel compelled to embellish the story and to add unnecessary characters, cinematic clichés or simply more context than needed. And in the process they tend to lose sight of what made the material worthy of bringing to the screen in the first place.
This is not the case here. Paul Greengrass's films always have cinematic scope, they never feel like cheap, made-for-TV pieces, yet he has a real knack for that stripped-down, documentary feel that really makes a movie like this work. He has proved it many times with excellent films like Bloody Sunday or Captain Phillips, and the same goes for United 93, as well. The beginning of the movie is truly amazing. Greengrass uses similar techniques here as in Captain Phillips (reminiscent of what Spielberg did in the opening scenes of Munich), building almost unbearable tension with simply presenting the flow of everyday life, people preparing for their journey at the airport. It's all in the sounds and the effective editing. No dialogue here, no 'movie drama', only the suffocating atmosphere, the sense of a tragedy coming.
United 93 never loses focus, and never wants to aggravate things. And by simply telling the gut-wrenching, tragic story life wrote, it truly honours the brave heroes and the memory of the victims.