United 93

Paul Greengrass, UK / France / USA, 2006
4 out 4 stars

When filmmakers promise me “realism” and “accuracy,” I usually have low expectations, as the notion of “reality” is simultaneously over-valued and endlessly travestied in modern culture. Jerky camera movements are supposed to reassure the audience that they’re not witnessing something that’s too “Hollywood,” as if we should trust something that deliberately seeks to provoke nausea while evoking little more than The Real World. Meanwhile, fidelity to minute details can often lead directly to an unwillingness or refusal to convey any real truth about the events at hand.

Miraculously, Paul Greengrass has avoided all of these pitfalls to create an astonishingly worthwhile piece about the America-changing trauma that was, and wasn’t. Of course, he avoids making the “let’s roll” guy into Rambo, something that would be terrifying to me but perhaps gratifying to many others, yet at the same time, his depiction of a largely helpless assortment of people (in the air and on the ground) who mostly react to whatever confronts them rather than decisively, out of some grander ideology.

We see all the times the dots should have been connected, and we even see the willingness of people in different offices to connect them, and yet we see how completely awry everything went. Most chilling of all, and still unfortunately relevant when one thinks about Katrina, is the reminder that TimeWarner (through CNN) is so much better equipped and aware of crucial goings-on then that government we pay so much for (and think how incompetent the news channels are!). What’s frightening about this film is that it is a quite real take on a national crisis that has been compared to Hollywood film catastrophes with unsettling frequency; by showing us a certainly mundane terror behind the whole thing, Greengrass actually takes some of the Hollywood out of it.

Source: Universal DVD
20 October, 10:07 PM