United 93

I watched United 93 with a heavy heart. One can’t help it. We all know what happened to that plane, but it does not diminish the impact Paul Greengrass’ understated movie has on me.

United 93 is a real time account of the doomed flight on September 11, 2001, a day that will forever live in infamy along with Japanese Pearl Harbor attack on this country. Actually these may be the only two plane attacks on American soil. The movie opens menacingly – New York City peacefully asleep, unaware the evil around it. From that point on the movie plays out like a docudrama, a reenactment of real-life events pieced together based on the phone records, recollections and certain stretch of imagination.

The whole movie has a grainy, hand-held camera look. People and locations all look so natural that one may feel the movie has directed itself. That is the exact genius of Greengrass in making this movie. He shows no sentimentality, points no finger and makes no political statement, yet the movie soars above the usual disaster and based-on-true-events genre. If one pays attention, one can discern some carefully crafted images. For example, when United 93 takes off, Greengrass has only the plane body to fill the screen. With the cockpit pointing upwards, it resembles a missile which is exactly what the terrorists used the planes for on that fateful day. There is no leading man/lady in this picture. Everyone except the terrorists is an ordinary citizen unknowingly involved in a maelstrom. Greengrass uses almost no music to help us feel what transpires on the screen. When Todd Beamer uttered that famous “Let’s roll”, there is nothing to emphasize its impact. It is simply like any other exchanges among the passengers.

Greengrass uses no stars in this movie, but the movie is not filled with a bunch of unknown actors. If you watch enough movies, you will recognize quite a few familiar faces. These are character actors who have appeared in countless movies as supporting roles.

United 93 is definitely not mindless entertainment or may not even qualify for entertainment. There is nothing entertaining watching a group of people walk into their deaths. When I was watching it, there were so many what ifs in my mind. What if there had been a mechanical problem with the plane, what if Mark Bingham had missed the plane, what if we already had strict no-knife rule for boarding a plane, what if all flights had been grounded the minute someone suspected there was a hijacked plane. The movie also exposes Americans’ false sense of security and their complacency with the status quo. It takes the second plane to hit the World Trade Center for air traffic controllers to understand the severity of the situation on hand. When American 11 first stops communication, it seems unthinkable that it is hijacked. When there is a real attack on our country, there seems to be only confusion and chaos. There is no clear chain of command and no leader is willing to make grave decisions.

In the end, the movie is not about heroes, but about a human tragedy. None of the passengers on the plane thought about stopping the attack; they thought about saving themselves. They didn’t want to be heroes; they only wanted to be alive. With their lives on the line, they acted far more heroically than those on land. The movie pays tribute to them, but it is also a paean of the human spirits – our desire for survival prompts us to fight any insurmountable obstacles. Once I read in a fortune cookie that “bravery is the capacity to perform properly when scared half to death.” United 93 is clearly a proof of that.