The continuing terror of United 93
United 93 review from the Ottawa Citizen:

Peter Simpson, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, April 25, 2006
United 93 is the most terrifying movie I've seen in years.

This is not a blurb of movie-critic hyperbole: It's a measured response to a movie that is too real, too recent, and too close to be seen, to be felt, as entertainment. It's more like group therapy: we all sit together to face this demon, to relive these horrible minutes in the hope of a collective release, or at least insight.

United 93 succeeds because director Paul Greengrass gives us a relentless, yet restrained, retelling of a day when we all stood together and watched a lot of innocent people die, a day when everything really did change -- and five years later continues to change. Greengrass does nothing to get in the way of the story. There is no melodrama, no romanticism, no torquing special effects, and no glimmering movie stars. The lone affectation is the use of handheld cameras, which give the film a jumpy volatility that reflects our shared helplessness, that fact we know what's coming and can't do a damn thing about it.

There's no back story: the movie begins early that morning and ends the instant the plane crashes into an empty field.

Those heartbreaking phone calls by doomed passengers to their loved ones on the ground are used more for narrative than dramatic effect: through them the passengers learned that planes have crashed into the World Trade Center. That changed everything on board, and in all likelihood saved many lives.

I expected to feel voyeuristic watching United 93, but in fact it was cathartic. Though the film is frequently claustrophobic -- most scenes are shot in the cabin of the aircraft or in windowless command centres -- it somehow speaks to the larger awareness that the attack was aimed not just at the thousands who died, but at our culture, our freedom, our future.

Well-told stories are essential to our collective understanding of what it all means.

Everybody with a heart was shaken that day, and there's a release in seeing the events portrayed like this, without judgment or sentiment. The film seeks neither to demonize nor sanctify, and restates the facts in almost documentary fashion.

The approach is profound in ways large and small.

There's a curious relief in seeing that everybody, even the most experienced aviation and military officials, reacted with the same disbelief as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, even though another had crashed into the towers moments earlier. My naivete was our naivete: we all shared that woefully misplaced complacency.

That footage of the second jet circling toward the towers -- the CNN broadcast is the only glimpse of the other three doomed aircraft seen in United 93 -- is the most chilling image of our era. It is cut into my memory like an etching on steel, both permanent and cold.

I remember the hollow feeling that followed, the ungodly mix of horror and helplessness, the draconian possibility that what we were seeing was "real world" and not a simulation or camera trick. I remember the dull realization that hate remains a powerful force, and is not safely locked in our history books like some deadly animal at the zoo. There it was before our very eyes, live on television, throwing jets full of innocent people into buildings full of ordinary people. How could such hate exist, and how could it strike with such conviction at the heart of Western society? How could this happen on this sunny, beautiful September morning?

Hate breeds hate, often under the red banner of vengeance, but Paul Greengrass doesn't fly that flag. We all know the hijackers die in the film, but there's no great moment of triumph, no grand and righteous blast of the trumpets. In the end there is only silence, and blackness. Then it's over.

Except in real life, of course, where it's not over, where it's never over. That's why well-told stories are so critically important. They may not bring us understanding of why things happen, but they show us why our response to terror is what keeps us free, that we must stand and spit in the face of hate. The passengers on Flight 93 realized their captors were determined to kill them all and a lot more people on the ground below. So they fought back, without weapons or hope, and sacrificed their own lives to save many others.

The feeling that hangs over United 93 is not suspense, but rather a rank sense of the inevitable, of the indifferent march of the facts toward a bitter fate.

Late in the flight we see both hijackers and passengers praying to God, in a macabre competition for divine intervention. We know there will be no salvation, that there is only truth and history, so real and so close that we can still feel its chill.

That's what makes United 93 so terrifying, in a way that no "horror movie" could equal.


Peter Simpson is the Citizen's Arts & Entertainment editor.