The shock and awe of the 9/11 attacks are revisited in this painstaking recreation of the last flight of one of the doomed aircraft. Writer-director Paul Greengrass works with a cast of unknowns to relive an intense and disturbing moment in history
"We have a real world situation here." This shout rings out across the control room of NEADS (Northeast Air Defence Sector), suspending the war game scheduled by the military for the morning of September 11, 2001. It also resounds across this recreation of the events surrounding one of the hijacked airliners used in the 9/11 terror attacks, the Boeing 757 known as United 93.
Writer-director Paul Greengrass has an excellent track record in recreating pivotal moments in recent history. His Bloody Sunday and Omagh rendered in painstaking detail two contentious flashpoints in the Troubles, while 'The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence' addressed the infamous murder of a young black Briton. Just as Bloody Sunday confined its action to the 24 hours in which a civil rights march turned into a bloodbath, so United 93 unfolds in real time across the morning of 9/11, using eyewitness accounts and the actual participants to show us what happened that morning in the control towers and military operations centres on the east coast.
What occured on the airplane itself is unknowable. There are fragments of evidence, such as the final phone calls from the passengers to their loved ones, and passenger Todd Beamer's overhead war-cry, "Let's roll". But most of what Greengrass shows happening minute-by-minute during the plane's 91 minutes in the air, is a "plausible truth", to use a phrase from the production, and one arrived at after intensive improvisation with a mostly unknown cast.
This fidelity to the "real world situation" makes for an intense experience, riding on the shoulders of ordinary people as they rally in the face of death. Stripped of the usual art of the Hollywood movie, no stars, no foreshadowing, no explicit moral, it's hard to know what to take from United 93, aside from an overwhelming sense of relief that you weren't on that plane. Ben Sliney (the man in charge of the FAA's command centre in Herndon on 9/11, who plays himself in Greengrass's film) says the film emphasises "how people in ordinary walks of life... could all rise to an occasion, which culminated in the ultimate self-sacrifice of the people on United 93." Greengrass himself sees the purpose of the film as being that "if you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can find in its shape something much larger than the event itself - the DNA of our times." Certainly, the recreation is ambivalent as to whether the passenger's struggle with the hijackers was the "ultimate self-sacrifice" or a desperate battle for survival. Once the adrenalin of the flight's closing moments dissipates, we are left with a resounding silence, and the sense that nothing can be drawn from this event, nothing learnt, and we have been watching a void.
While the largely unknown cast of passengers are convincing, it is the actors playing the terrorists who are particularly striking. Tellingly, while the press notes contain the biographies of the passengers who died, they omit any mention either of the terrorists or the people who play them, as if to credit these actors would be somehow disrespectful. This only emphasises what an odd interzone Greengrass's film moves within, between reality and fiction. The director also has The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum on his CV, and although he is artful in his realism, scrupulous in avoiding either sensationalism or sentimentality, there is impressive fiction here. That actor Lewis Alsamari (who plays hijacker Saeed Al Ghamdi) was actually refused entry to the US to attend the premiere of United 93 is a particularly strange conflation of the real and the unreal that feels most revealing of the "DNA of our times".
Writer-director Paul Greengrass has an excellent track record in recreating pivotal moments in recent history. His Bloody Sunday and Omagh rendered in painstaking detail two contentious flashpoints in the Troubles, while 'The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence' addressed the infamous murder of a young black Briton. Just as Bloody Sunday confined its action to the 24 hours in which a civil rights march turned into a bloodbath, so United 93 unfolds in real time across the morning of 9/11, using eyewitness accounts and the actual participants to show us what happened that morning in the control towers and military operations centres on the east coast.
What occured on the airplane itself is unknowable. There are fragments of evidence, such as the final phone calls from the passengers to their loved ones, and passenger Todd Beamer's overhead war-cry, "Let's roll". But most of what Greengrass shows happening minute-by-minute during the plane's 91 minutes in the air, is a "plausible truth", to use a phrase from the production, and one arrived at after intensive improvisation with a mostly unknown cast.
This fidelity to the "real world situation" makes for an intense experience, riding on the shoulders of ordinary people as they rally in the face of death. Stripped of the usual art of the Hollywood movie, no stars, no foreshadowing, no explicit moral, it's hard to know what to take from United 93, aside from an overwhelming sense of relief that you weren't on that plane. Ben Sliney (the man in charge of the FAA's command centre in Herndon on 9/11, who plays himself in Greengrass's film) says the film emphasises "how people in ordinary walks of life... could all rise to an occasion, which culminated in the ultimate self-sacrifice of the people on United 93." Greengrass himself sees the purpose of the film as being that "if you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can find in its shape something much larger than the event itself - the DNA of our times." Certainly, the recreation is ambivalent as to whether the passenger's struggle with the hijackers was the "ultimate self-sacrifice" or a desperate battle for survival. Once the adrenalin of the flight's closing moments dissipates, we are left with a resounding silence, and the sense that nothing can be drawn from this event, nothing learnt, and we have been watching a void.
While the largely unknown cast of passengers are convincing, it is the actors playing the terrorists who are particularly striking. Tellingly, while the press notes contain the biographies of the passengers who died, they omit any mention either of the terrorists or the people who play them, as if to credit these actors would be somehow disrespectful. This only emphasises what an odd interzone Greengrass's film moves within, between reality and fiction. The director also has The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum on his CV, and although he is artful in his realism, scrupulous in avoiding either sensationalism or sentimentality, there is impressive fiction here. That actor Lewis Alsamari (who plays hijacker Saeed Al Ghamdi) was actually refused entry to the US to attend the premiere of United 93 is a particularly strange conflation of the real and the unreal that feels most revealing of the "DNA of our times".
Verdict
An intensely upsetting and traumatic film that returns us to the shock and awe of the morning of 9/11.
An intensely upsetting and traumatic film that returns us to the shock and awe of the morning of 9/11.
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