2.Main Content
United 93
Mon, 19 Feb 2007
Screenwriter Graham Stokhuyzen lifts the lid on United 93 to find a work of surprising dramatic subtlety …
United 93 is a real time re-creation of flight UA93 that took off from Newark International, New Jersey on the morning of Monday 11 September 2001 destined for San Francisco and crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania just over 90 minutes later. On board were 40 passengers and crew, some of whom had forced their way into the cockpit in a bid to wrest control of the plane from the four jihadist terrorists who had redirected the Boeing 757 towards Washington. The events of that day are presented in a documentary-style narrative, seamlessly mixing actors and actual participants, script and improvisation. 
Keenly aware of his personal obligations to those that died and the friends and family that survive them, director Paul Greengrass goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure the fabric of the tragedy – the details of the Boeing’s interior, the set up of the control tower at Newark and the Control Centre at Boston, the final, desperate phone calls to loved ones – is as authentic as possible.
It’s a stark, unflinching look at the effects of terrorism and in committing the events of 9/11 to screen, Greengrass plunges himself back into the arena of social activism previously explored with Bloody Sunday and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. And yet by channelling our experience of the day’s events through the eyes and ears of the forty passengers and crew, Greengrass cuts through the political and religious context and re-captures the raw, undiluted savagery of the assault.
So unsettling is the effect of witnessing the events in such an intimate way, that it is easy to miss the dramatic techniques Greengrass employs to deliver such heights of tension. This is – after all – also the director of The Bourne Supremacy. Observing the film as a piece of dramatic narrative is not to downplay its cultural significance, nor its duty to the memories of those who died, rather, it offers up some fascinating insights into the nature of our personal reaction to the events of 9/11.
In structural terms, the key to much of the film’s impact is disorientation. It opens with the terrorists at prayer and then moves on to the passengers awaiting boarding in the departure lounge at Newark. Several make calls from their mobile phones, one discusses an email that he wants to be copied in on. From here, we move to the Control Tower where Ben Sliney – playing himself – starts his first day in command. His colleagues applaud his arrival before two subordinates brief him succinctly on the day’s weather forecast. Ben follows protocol, issues confident instructions to the team and they click into gear.
This is a world of order and social cohesion. But the cohesion is fragile. Through the lens of hindsight we sense the ominous conviction in the terrorists’ prayers and the danger of complacency in Sliney’s smoothly patterned behaviour. In the departure lounge, the forty passengers sit in close proximity yet are separated one from another by the phones pressed to their ears. A sense of vulnerability prevails.
The lead terrorist - a sensitive looking man in his late-twenties – makes one last call. “I love you” he whispers down the phone in German. Is this a code signal, or is he saying his farewells to the loved one he might also possess? Once the passengers have boarded, we sit with them as they settle in, the dramatic irony peaking as a late arrival sprints down the gangway, sighing with relief as he shows his boarding stub to the stewardess. As the flight prepares for take-off our sense of trepidation grows, not only because of what we know will happen, but also because of its implications for our own cocooned existence. We engage with the easy familiarity of these moments and then remember how they can be blown apart.
When the second plane hits the World Trade centre we are transfixed by the image, but it is not until the shock-wave hits Sliney and his team at Newark that we are pulled deeper into the growing chaos of the event. Panic erupts in the control room and procedure by procedure, their operation collapses. At the Northeast Air Defence Sector (NEADS) in upstate New York, Colonel Robert Marr calls in desperation to his superiors for his ‘ROE’ – Rules of Engagement - while in the air a terrorist shouts in Arabic ‘in the name of God the merciful and compassionate’ as he slits a throat. But no authority can be found to bring order and meaning. There are no rules of engagement for this new threat. Driven to distraction by the mounting horror unfolding around him, Sliney exercises his powers to their legal limit and grounds every one of the 4,500 planes crossing North America that day. “We’re at war with someone” he gasps, “and until we know what to do about it, we’re finished.”
Not all of the film’s dramatic devices contribute as effectively to this sense of compromised reality. The use of the German passenger as a failed appeaser of the terrorists jars with an audience perhaps overly sensitised to being labelled ‘old Europe’ in its attitude towards terrorism. It also stays disbelief for a moment as you pause to wonder whether events truly unfolded precisely in the manner portrayed, or whether the passenger in question was done at least a small injustice by the filmmakers. Similarly, the footnotes on which the film closes, which point out how slow the American military were to act in defence of their skies seem unnecessary. Any sense of political outrage is drowned out by the violent dissonance of the human tragedy just witnessed. And even after the event, the readiness or otherwise of the airforce seems of secondary importance compared to the spectacle of courage born out of such abject desperation.
These are fleeting moments though in the context of a film event that is gripping and provocative. Its core is neither its carefully observed verisimilitude, nor its laudably faithful re-creation of the lives that were lost. It is its success in capturing the seismic collision of realities in which a notion of human protocol was found to be exposed and vulnerable in the face of an incomprehensible assault. It traps you within the catastrophe that befalls flight UA93, the workers in the two control towers and the NEADS base and forces you to ask yourself: what would I do? In answering that question truthfully – whether as hero or coward – the film succeeds in re-engaging us directly with the impact of 9/11 on our lives today.
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This review is by Graham Stokhuyzen.
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