United 93’s horrific 9/11 story is no cheap exploitation flick

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This article was published 10/09/2011 (5203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fictional, dramatized movies based on actual events — especially events as widely recorded and transmitted as the 9/11 terror attacks — are often tacky and pointless, with mediocre actors mimicking real people and hoping to shed new light on matters already and comprehensively on the public record.

United 93, U.K. filmmaker Paul Greengrass’s harrowing, real-time account of passengers who rebelled against hijackers of a United Airlines passenger jet on Sept. 11, 2001, is different, though — in part because no one knows in precise detail what happened aboard the ill-fated plane, and in part because the filmmakers quite openly admit in a disclaimer that imagination had to be used to fill in some of the blanks.

An exhaustive timeline was assembled in the days and weeks following the 9/11 terror attacks, based on cellphone conversations from United Flight 93 while it was still in the air, surveillance-camera footage at the airport where the passengers boarded and the plane’s cockpit voice recorder. A comprehensive timeline was printed in Vanity Fair and other publications, and a clearer picture of what happened aboard the hijacked airliner started to emerge.

Greengrass began his career as a journalist in the 1980s, for the ITV current-affairs program World in Action, and United 93 benefits from the journalist’s eye for detail and documentary technique. Anyone looking for an emotionally overwrought hero-worship drama with loud, swelling music will be disappointed. United 93 is not a documentary, but it sure looks, sounds and feels like one.

It’s also, for a tale of human courage and self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds, hard to watch. The passengers aboard United Flight 93 are regarded as heroes and have been accorded an almost saintly status in recent American history.

Greengrass has taken a very literal, level-headed approach, however. It’s hard to remember, but, in 2006, when United 93 was first released — controversially — in movie theatres, it was one of the first Hollywood feature films to base its narrative strictly on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Greengrass may have dramatized reality, but enough remains of the actual record to paint a disturbing, hard-to-forget picture. He doesn’t flinch from the emotional detail: the fear the passengers must have felt, the brutal murder of a flight attendant during the hijackers’ takeover — her voice can be plainly heard on the real-life cockpit voice recording, followed by a man saying in Arabic, “Everything is fine, I finished” — and the defiant cellphone calls to loved ones, moments before the fatal impact.

The 9/11 anniversary media blitz may strike some as over-the-top, but United 93 is no cheap exploitation flick, nor is it a lame, rote TV movie-of-the-week. It’s as close to being there as it’s possible for a dramatized account to be. In its own offhand, unassuming way, it’s unforgettable. No film received more No. 1 mentions on critics’ 2006 Top 10 lists than United 93, according to the aggregation site, MetaCritic.com and it’s easy to see why.

 

— Postmedia News