Much Better When It's Limited to the Plane

Rating: 7/10 (29 April 2006)

I said it in my review of "Brick", something is going to have to blow me further away to make me think of it as a better movie this year. And "United 93" isn't that.
In fact, I was rather disappointed.
The scenes on-board the actual plane are amazing and tense and define a lot of...stuff. You know, that Americans can unite for a short period of time. That, though we may all be different, we all love and care for other people.
Then everything else is pretty much "Armageddon". We're in the scenes where everyone is in the control room, babbling incoherently. I was bored. Everything made this to be a story about United Airlines flight 93, not everything else that was going on on September 11th. In fact, that's what I was really hoping for. But no. We're in that stupid control room and it's taking away from the film. Not to mention, it all felt like a prolonged scene from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". "Do you want to report a UFO? Repeat: do you want to report a UFO?" As an audience, we know exactly what happened that day from an outsiders' point-of-view. I frankly wasn't interested in seeing what the military was doing.
I do like Paul Greengrass's work, but I think he shakes the cameraman by the shoulders when he's filming something. There are times when the shaky camera does work. Like the hijacking and the uprising. I would be willing to bet that those times were just a big mess of confusion, and I think the film delivers that greatly. But everything else is super-hand-held. It gets annoying. I've seen other, better, hand-held movies. Just look at "Saving Private Ryan" for one. When the characters are steady, the shots are nearly steady. The same goes for "The Constant Gardener" and any Robert Rodriguez flick pre-"Spy Kids". They know how to control it and it works better.
The camera-work is more overused here than it is during "The Bourne Supremacy". "Supremecy" was all about confusion and spy-tactics and everything, so it was effective. People know what's going on in this movie (after a certain point and strictly limited to those stupid control room scenes) but they don't know what to do about it.
Again, the United 93 scenes work so much, because Greengrass lets us get into the characters (or as much as they could base off the characters). The phoning home scenes are touching and show that people do care about others besides themselves. There were no messages of hatred or anything, even though what these terrorists were doing was pretty horrible. Those final moments (before the uprising) were about making peace, and that is demonstrated greatly. We saw it in "Munich" as the main characters suffer and we in turn are more connected to the action on screen. This is what happens during the plane sequences.
Personally, I think Greengrass should have abandoned the whole "real-time" aspect. This makes all the control room scenes seem like a dull episode of "24" while the cameraman has a seizure. He could have easily made a tight film cutting all that out, and emotionally I believe it would have impacted everyone even more.
"United 93", while it is a good film, it could have been delivered in such a better way. I repeat (because I'm a post-Modernists and we do like repetition), the airplane scenes are gripping and heartfelt and the best parts of the movie. Pity it wasn't limited to just that.
B