This weekend the funWife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by seeing United 93. It isn’t the typical date movie, and I was worried about seeing it since I’m going to be on some long plane flights this summer, but we went ahead anyway and we were glad we saw it.
It is an amazing movie. Normally Hollywood takes a great story and tries to improve upon it but rarely succeeds. Thankfully, there was none of that for this movie, and instead it was told in a documentary style that let the events speak for themselves. The power of the movie comes from the power of the events themselves, and not from any artificial additions (compare Saving Private Ryan with its miserable phony framing device to Schindler’s List which (by and large) just told the story). This is the second movie I’ve seen where it simply starts – no previews, no title sequence, just the lights go out and the movie starts. It makes for a better experience, IMHO.
The movie starts with the hijackers getting ready in the morning and then the attack of 9/11 is recreated through the story of United 93 – the airtraffic controllers, the military, the passangers and hijackers on the flight. No backstory, no flashbacks, nobody is introduced except through the details of the exposition itself. It’s a hard movie to watch because it brings back all the horror and confusion of 9/11, and sitting through the final scenes of the passangers, scared, confused, and yet ultimately fighting back is especially difficult. And that’s why this is filmaking at its finest – an unflinching look at events very few people really want to look at, but you want to during the movie.
It must have been very hard for the actors who portrayed the hijackers. I know a lot of big stars love playing the villain in a movie, but that really is play acting as those villains aren’t real, and the byzantine plans of mayhem and distruction are pure screen writer fantasy. Not so in this case, where the villains, the mayhem and the destruction were all too real.
The only thing I found odd was that the movie has some European passanger counseling do nothing and even tries to tell the terrorists the passangers are plotting to attack them. Is there some basis for this?
Libertas liked the movie;
A student at Cal Poly didn’t ;
And the final word(s) goes to the ladies of the cotillion.
