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August 30, 2006
United 93: A Screaming Comes Across The Sky
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
In Stephanie Zacharek's wonderful review of Paul Greengrass' United 93 for Salon, she poses the question "What's the value of artistry that sucks the life out of you?". I was wondering that same question in a different context just the other night, watching Mogwai at their raucous best in the crowded confines of the Corner Hotel in Richmond. The noises they were making were undoubtedly beautiful, even when troublesome, but there was something altogether more unwholesome and challenging at play beneath the surface, hidden deep in frequencies we rarely encounter. It was the experience of sonic assault, a sensation of the body's immune system kicking in to attempt to repel the invading sounds, the challenge of not passing out (a challenge which the odd punter around the venue appeared to fail). The finest moment in Mogwai's output--that part on "Christmas Steps" towards the end of Come On, Die Young where the delicately plucked guitars are crept up on by a bass warning of impending doom, where you've been lulled into drowsiness but then slowly pull yourself to, just in time for two guitars to crash in like precision bombs, scattering the remnants of the song in a thousand directions--serves as an introduction to a good hour or so of pure attack. You stand in awe at the artistry of it all, but you also have to wonder just what you're doing subjecting your eardrums and your internals to it. What's the value of this artistry? Why would I subject myself to this pain?
And just two days later, on the other side of the country in the comfort of a beanbag in a private screening room, I experience what in some ways is an even more visceral shock.
It's been five years since September 11. We've begun to see many films dealing with the fallout of the event, and everything that happened since, in America, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Some incredible films, such as Michael Winterbottom's upcoming Road to Guantanamo, turn a very disturbing critical eye on the American government. But the world was a very different place on the morning of September 11, 2001 and we've not yet had a film which documents, without conspiracy theories and schmaltzy hollywood heroics, that shock of the western world lurching into somewhere new.
There were four planes that crashed on September 11. Two hit the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon. The fourth never reached its target -- United Airlines flight 93, which was probably on its way to the White House or the Capitol building in Washington, crashed into a field in Virginia after its passengers, realising their flight was on a suicide mission, overpowered their captors and steered the plane into the ground.
It's the stuff of legend, myth even. What we've pieced together in ensuing years has become part of our post 9-11 culture. That last line former footballer Todd Beamer uttered before the passengers rushed to their death, it's been repeated by presidents and musicians ad nauseum. It became a call to arms. "Let's roll."
United 93 is the story of that flight, and of that day. Many people have asked whether this film needed to be made, or if it needed to be made yet. And I'm not sure I know the answer to that -- it is certainly one of the most harrowing filmgoing experiences I have ever had. For the last 20 minutes of the film, in their painful, woozy inevitability, I found my hands gripped hard to the side of the chair. It hurt like hell.
Technorati Tags: film, greengrass, united 93
But if a film had to be made, this would be it. It is directed by Paul Greengrass, the director of one of the greatest films about the Irish troubles, Bloody Sunday. It's more likely you'll be familiar with his shakycam pseudo-documentary style from his crack at the action genre in the second of the Bourne films, the Bourne Supremacy (which was in fact a wonderful film). But Bloody Sunday told the story of one of the key moments of the troubles, the massacre of marchers in Derry in 1972 by British paratroopers, through a meticulously researched and rawly presented view of the day's events from both sides.
We see the events of September 11 unfold from many angles -- the first 45 minutes of the film, while United 93 sits grounded at Newark airport, delayed from a busy morning's traffic, are mainly shown through the eyes of air traffic controllers, administrators and military (many of them the real life people of the day, playing themselves) as they struggle to come to grips with what's happening on their screens. We watch the inevitable journey of the first two flights towards the World Trade Center, and we know what's happening. But these people have no context to imagine it. They watch, powerless. They ring each other on telephones. Bureaucracy fails despite the best efforts of the people within it. Overheard fragments of angry voices on the radio must be retrieved from magnetic tape. When the flights disappear from the radar over lower Manhattan, they spend their time trying to figure out where they could have landed.
It's only when somebody turns on CNN that the truth dawns on those we all presumed would have known first. They got their information from the same place as us. And they followed that sometimes incorrect information as we did. Greengrass presents this stuff very carefully and compellingly -- many of the people involved are actually playing themselves, reliving the roles they lived through on the day in question. When we see the second plane hit the towers from the point of view of controllers at Newark airport, we feel just how it must have felt on the day. The image of plane two hitting tower two is one of the most pervasive of our times, yet Greengrass manages to draw our last drops of emotion and shock from it in unexpected ways.
This world the film puts us in is so compelling that when we finally take flight with United 93 (which could have been grounded before it took off if authorities had acted quicker) we long for the brief respite of returns to the control towers. What transpires on the plane is pieced together from black box transcripts and the famous mobile phone and airphone calls made by passengers to their loved ones. The three terrorists are not portrayed as cartoon villains, but scared committed zealots, probably brainwashed but still also aware they are going to a place nobody has ever been. Their conversation is subtitled when they talk to each other, but if any of the passengers are present, we do not get subtitles -- we feel the fear and disorientation the passengers must have had of this incomprehensible shouting from an alien other.
The men on the plane who do eventually rush the cockpit are not all-American heroes. They're not even doing what they do to save Washington. They realise, in the end, that they are going to die, and their only hope of survival is to take the plane back, at all costs. And so they do. They rush the cockpit, overpower the terrorists, there is blood and adrenaline and a food trolley bashed over and over into the cockpit door while the terrorist pilot lurches the plane desperately from side to side in a last ditch attempt to save the mission. Through the point of view of the handheld cameras in the claustrophobic cabin, this is incredibly difficult to watch but also somehow cathartic. We do hear the words "let's roll", but they are underplayed, in the background, not a grand heroic statement. In the real world, Greengrass knows there are no grand heroes. Just people, in situations, who react.
There is no way in which you can fault United 93 as a film. It is as close to perfect as you are going to get -- nothing could have been improved (despite minor quibbles on technical accuracy). Greengrass does an excellent job of pointing just enough fingers at incompetent and naive bureaucracies while not making any individual seem like a bad guy. We get an understanding of how it felt to be on the ground on that morning, and though we could never know how it felt to be in the air, a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his waist hoarding you and your terrified co-passengers together at the back of a plane destined to crash, we get about as close as we could possibly get. Do we need to? Do you need to watch this? I don't honestly know. Perhaps this is a filmic document for future generations, not for us. Like Winterbottom's Road to Guantanamo, I left it feeling shattered, angry and drained. Perhaps sometimes that's all a great film can give you. Sometimes there's just no hope to be found.
Posted by patrick at August 30, 2006 1:05 PM
Comments
I saw this finally yesterday, and so I'm revisiting this post of yours which I read a while ago. I agree with your comments - it made for harrowing, cathartic viewing.
Some nice touches in the screenplay: one, the lingering shot of gallons of fuel ticking up into the aircraft as it prepared for takeoff. Two, the juxtaposition of Islamic and Christian prayers as the plane began its final descent to destruction. Three, the pointed dedication to "all those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001" in the afterword.
"There is no way in which you can fault United 93 as a film"
I found one way. As you've written, it seemed to me to be a practically perfect film, I did feel the use of music was terribly hamfisted, almost from the very start. The soundtrack began to be used to build atmosphere and tension immediately, when the point, as we saw the banal activities of the flight's passengers in the departure lounge, should have been that there was no tension, no atmosphere. I would love to see a cut with no music.
But even after reading a lot of positive reviews you have to pay tribute to the total absence of romanticism, and the film's measured implications about the current state of the struggle between radical Islam and the US.
Posted by: Tom Lynch at September 13, 2006 8:30 AM
