by Chris Narkun
Daily Lobo
If you've read anything about "United 93," the first major Hollywood film to deal directly with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, you've almost certainly been subjected to this question: Is it too soon?
What you probably missed in all the media hype was another crucial question: Is the movie any good?
The answers to those questions are, respectively, no and yes.
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"United 93," written and directed by British filmmaker Paul Greengrass and populated by unknown or nonprofessional actors, is an authentic, gut-wrenchingly intense film that expertly focuses on a few important slices of the complex series of events that took place the day of the attacks.
The interest of the film is the story of the passengers on the only flight hijacked that day that didn't hit its target. But Greengrass wisely alternates between the scenes on the plane and events in the airline's air traffic control rooms, military headquarters, the National Air Traffic Control Center and, in one of the film's most memorable moments, New York's LaGuardia control tower.
This presentation of events from the perspective of those who had the most information, and yet were as helpless as those watching television from their homes, is brutally effective, and lends the confusion and miscommunication between airlines, passengers and government officials a sense of tragedy.
Viewing events at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center through this perspective makes the brutally vivid scenes on the last doomed airliner even more intense.
Shot with the same cinÇma-vÇritÇ style Greengrass used in his first major film - 2002's excellent "Bloody Sunday," about the British massacre of Irish protesters in the 1970s - "United 93" doesn't pander to the audience with in-depth, emotionally saccharine looks at individual passengers.
With no camera filters, no movie stars, little makeup and none of the multi-million-dollar, fake-looking computer effects that would have given the film the manipulative feel of a special episode of "Mission: Impossible," Greengrass presents a vision of events that is as accurate as possible and treated with the appropriate gravity and respect. He avoids turning the passengers into patriotic warrior heroes and instead presents a group of terrified, distraught people doing whatever they could to survive.
While it will probably never be known to what extent the passenger revolt caused the plane to go down, the film's version of those last minutes of flight are as chaotic and heartrending as most of us could have imagined in the weeks after the attacks.
Whether it is too soon after the attacks for artistic interpretations - and it needs to be said that this is most certainly not a vacuous studio's attempt at money-grubbing in the ashes of a tragedy - I actually felt more at peace with the events of that day after walking out of the theater.
