Informed Speculation

Okay, suppose we dispose with the preliminaries and set some ground rules up front. I won’t presume to know whether you should see the movie, and I won’t insult your intelligence by painting a decision either way as good or bad. It’s a movie, after all, no matter how grave the subject matter.

Of course, with this movie, the subject matter is, if not all, then a good chunk of all. There’s also the matter of craftsmanship, and respect for the victims, and that intangible je ne sais quoi that seperates those movies that have got it from those that don’t…and United 93 has it.

From a purely artistic standpoint, there are so few missteps that to point them out would be churlish. The handheld cameras shake just enough to bring in realism and not enough to annoy. The soundtrack of understated electronic music brings just the right touch of menace without melodrama. Paul Greengrass has made a movie that is so excellent on the fundamentals that it is almost a shame that his movie is such an incredible downer.

And a downer it is. There are at least a half-dozen moments in the film where your heart leaps up in your throat and lodges uncomfortably there. You know the story, so I can’t spoil anything by telling you that the footage of the World Trade Center, a clever mixture of real footage as shown on CNN and as if displayed through the window of Newark’s and New York’s air traffic control centers, is as much a punch in the gut, a horrendous vision from Hell itself, as it ever was. It burned a hole right through my psyche and left a spot so raw that it never fails to respond, no matter how often I see it.

This is a film about United 93, though, and the WTC is important to this film only inasmuch as it supplies the context for the drama happening in the control centers of the FAA and the military…and as it supplies the impetus for the realization that the flight of United 93 would end in no way but death. It’s not that the passengers who rushed that cockpit (and yes, in the film, they breach it, but it’s too late, as the whole world knows) had ruled out survival – they searched for a pilot and planned on landing – but the fact remains that no one in that position could have felt any confidence in any outcome that was good.

When the terrible end is reached, I heard nothing. Often people say “you could have heard a pin drop”…only this time the saying was fully realized. There is no catharsis here…just an excellent movie about an awful event that was only part of a day that should have never dawned. Bill Murray once relived Groundhog’s Day over and over again until he got it right. I wish our world had gotten stuck on September 10th…but the sun came up and the day’s evil was done, and now I’m forced to relive a completely different sort of day until the end of my time.

I’m glad I saw this movie; I’m glad that the filmmakers crafted it with so much reverence; I’m grateful that I’m not the only one whose mind keeps hitting replay. I can only close in one way: with a prayer for the souls of the departed. May God bless and keep them.