United 93

It’s morning in a generic airport motel room. The sky is dark, and only a bedside lamp suffuses the room with a lethargic orange light.

“It’s time”

Ruthless with its benign indifference, the cruel march of time is the heart, the raison d’etre to watch United 93. Movies are reliant on time to work their magic. Books can be read in fragments, with the tempo, focus, and emphasis all controlled by the reader. In the movies, you submit yourself to completely to the director’s control of events and the projector’s metronomic release. The action is predetermined and the outcomes unchangeable, but the magic happens when the viewer can suspend their belief and experience the world the way the filmmakers intended.

The critical decision made by writer/director Paul Greengrass was to play out the events of the doomed flight 93 in real time. We all know exactly how this one is going to end. What makes it so gripping is how exquisitely detailed the present tense is throughout. Surrendering that control of time makes United 93 more harrowing. The audience has the awful foreknowledge of what’s coming, and is helpless. Like a dream, it’s awful to endure the moments of waiting for the inevitable. The audience is trapped, just like the passengers on the plane, suspended without a possible release.

On the surface, it sounds like a pitch for the worst film imaginable. A meticulous re-enactment of the fourth flight of the 9/11 attacks, written and directed by a British filmmaker… Are you kidding me? Who could imagine walking out of that theater with a bounce in their step, eager for a spot of dessert and coffee?

Miraculously, viewing United 93 is not an act of masochism or self-flagellation. It’s challenging and provocative, raising sadness and anger in equal parts. As excruciating as it might seem (and the moment of hijacking in particular is brutal to watch), it’s almost relieving. Every moment in the film underscores the humanity behind everything that happened that morning. We’re far enough away from the attacks to let some of the details fade, and to refresh our memories again of how ruthlessly simple and inconceivable those attacks were. In the ensuing years of hysteria and self-examination, a reverence has sprung up around 9/11, and it’s easy to forget that it started like any other day.

First focusing on the air traffic controllers who are the first people to face the unthinkable, the decision to use many of the real people in the control rooms that day pays off in spades. There is an unbearable, documentary-like urgency as the unthinkable events unfold in catastrophic sequence. An anomaly turns out to be a hijacking. Who’d believe it? Air traffic control wants to find something familiar in the explanation – a transponder glitch, a mechanical error, a statement of demands from a hijacker. Instead, they have nothing but their own gut, which can’t comprehend what is about to unfold.

The film continues to unfold sequentially from there, smoothly sliding from a compressed time scale to unbroken real time as United Flight 93 lifts off. The ‘24’ clichés of clocks and constant reminders of the gimmick are avoided, and no special point is made of running in real time. This just enhances the verisimilitude, because on that morning, nobody else was clock watching either.

The instinct with film is to slow down the climactic moments, to rip them free of the tyranny of minutes and seconds and let that moment of impact resonate outside of time. By making the ‘time’ element impossible, that dramatic moment is lifted into the realm of fiction – like a beautifully crafted sentence that the reader can linger gently over. If you can take an instant out of time, it slows down and comes from a realm where it might not be true, where it’s all a trick of the movies. United 93 doesn’t pander to those instincts.

This is a clear-eyed vision of that morning, and in some ways it de-mystifies the tragedy. Here the first plane impacts the World Trade Center entirely off-screen. The second tower is hit in the dizzying blink of an eye, deep in the background of one shot. A couple of air traffic controllers see the impact by chance, the rest were so focused on their screens that they have to wait for the CNN replay to see what’s happened. Just like the rest of us.

United 93 constantly reminds us that simple, unextraordinary humans had to process the unthinkable. Organizations like the FAA operate like distant parents – maintaining order and authority, without an explanation or apology. What is rarely considered or seen is that the makers of that authority, like parents, are not endowed with superhuman powers. When a historical tidal wave upsets the order of things, they’re just as unprepared as anyone to face it. How do you respond to the unthinkable?

In the final moments, the passengers of flight 93 get the chance to respond. Like the air traffic controllers, like the rest of the world, they had to make a collective decision about their fate, all while knowing as little about that day as you did at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Here, United 93’s fictional creation rings as conceivably true. The shocking rumors about other hijackings rippling through the crowd, passing from mouth to mouth, and the camera rides this wave of information gracefully, as each new bit of speculation changes the world with each new set of ears it reaches. The heroism is stirring, and the emotional saving grace is that as you watch it, you can’t shake the urge that they can be saved. That if you were there, or if they had just a little more time, the passengers of flight 93 might have made it

There is an event horizon, a boundary between innocence and calamity, and United 93 remains flawlessly suspended in that shockwave that has changed America. We are, after all, as ensnared in the aftermath of 9/11 as tightly as the passengers on United 93 were caught up in history. The sun will rise and the day will unspool with a grim, relentless quality, just as every day before and after has unspooled. If our world changed that morning, then the potential remains for it to change again on another.