This was a hard review to write and I’m still not sure that I haven’t been completely unjust … but it’s an honest personal reaction, for whatever that’s worth. To avoid any confusion, I believe that the US release title is the one above, at least according to the IMDB.

United 93 / Dir : Paul Greengrass

A lot of questions have been asked regarding whether it’s too early to be dramatising the events of September 11th 2001 - whether it’s exploitational or simply insensitive to probe such a recent tragedy. I don’t have an answer to that, but what I came away from United 93 with is a feeling that perhaps it is too early to make a good film on the subject.

Superficially a reconstruction of events surrounding the terrorist hijacking of United flight 93, Paul Greengrass’s movie actually spends most of its first hour sidetracked by Air-Traffic-Control and the military as they try to understand and then in some way manage the developing crisis. Obviously, it would have been ridiculous to drag out the thirty minutes or so while the flight was under terrorist control to feature film length - Greengrass had to lead up to the hijacking in some way. If the introduction doesn’t serve as useful context (and to be fair, the reason that it doesn’t is that we already know most of what’s presented here), it does at least build a picture of the total lack of preparation or comprehension that delayed a response until it was far too late.

It might be argued that this is necessary - but as an audience we already know the situation all too well, and it often feels like padding. Worse, it’s clumsily scripted and acted, and the more it struggles for veracity the closer it drifts to mockumentary. Ironically, part of the fault here is in the hands of real people portraying themselves - they come over as doing exactly that. The shaky handheld camera and bleached colour (as used to almost identical purpose in Greengrass’s last picture, The Bourne Supremacy) only worsen the situation - why are we expected to believe that documentary trappings makes a film somehow more authentic? This first and largest part of the film is unconvincing on a number of levels.

And then, two thirds of the way in - that is, from the point that United 93 is hijacked - it transforms. Abruptly, all of the elements that have seemed clumsy and distancing begin to work. The camera is no longer a distraction but a living presence stalking through the plane, shying away from nothing, quietly observing moments of pain and sadness and fear from passengers and hijackers alike. Here, the performances are excellent, the subtlety that has been missing so far arrives in spades, and Greengrass manages to draw salient observations from the apparent chaos. As the hijackers become increasingly terrified of their victims, the divide between them narrows, and finally we are allowed to put such distinctions aside, if only for the briefest of moments. As a dissection of how people behave in appalling circumstances, whether it be with bravery or cruelty, with love for their family or for their god, this last third of United 93 is brilliant, compulsive and heartbreaking.

In the end though, United 93 is something more and less than a film - it’s a social document in a way that it wouldn’t have been had it come out in, say, ten years time. Reviewing it as a work of art, or even as historical fiction, is perhaps superfluous. As a film, in its entirety, United 93 fails on many levels - but as a record of and an attempt to understand a particular moment of history from the level of personal tragedy it succeeds very well.