This is one intense film. It is relentless and doesn’t let up until the very. last. moment. I was moved and angered but mostly impressed by the economy of the writing and filmmaking (United 93 makes Munich look like a baroque opera). The “villains” are presented as human (for the most part); you certainly feel their passion and their fear. The passengers lack character per se, but their growing desire to try to do something is palpable, admirable, heroic even (though, by the end, things do go a bit Lord of the Flies . . . puns not intended). The chaos on the ground (in Boston, New York, Newark, Cleveland and some military location) is both outrageous and completely understandable–forgiveable even. There are a couple of ideologically loaded moments (the hijackers in the airport walking past large, glossy, back-lit advertisements for various consumer products. The FAA and the military frustrated by their inability to locate the President to make a necessary leadership decision (the gossip that the Vice President over stepped his bounds by ordering planes shot down is not broached). The audience with whom I sat were visibly emotional and very, very quiet. If one was in any way close to this event, I just don’t know how they could sit through the film.
I’ve started looking at some reviews and I like this one over at the Village Voice, but you should probably wait to read it until after seeing the film.
Yeah, you don’t want to ruin the ending.
HAH!
Seriously though.
9/11.
Patriotism.
Nucular.
you mean i have to watch this movie?
an interesting article about it on slate. i had no idea that this is the third flight 93 movie.
deep, deep apologies for posting this totally non-movie-related email, but we need a lot of signatures fast and my lowly “level 2” status on this blog doesn’t give me access to your email addresses.
can you sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/7779/petition.html and forward it to your colleagues, friends, listservs, and associations? it is primarily for academics of all ranks (students, staff, faculty, workers), but everyone can sign. lots of important people have already signed.
(when you click, and even when you cut an paste, sometimes extraneous characters appear in the url. they are easily identifiable and you can clean them up manually. don’t know why that happens).
graduation is may 12 and we need thousands of signatures by then! my email address is gpompele@gmail.com.
thank you guys!!! haven’t watched a movie in ages!!! :-(
did you all bastards sign yet? i need all your names on the petition, pronto!
I signed it you bastardess!
what I object to in the film is the gratuitous scene in which Karen Black takes control of the plane. That never happened!
I liked the part where the terrorist said “Death to infidels! And don’t call me Shirley.”
Michael’s joke was a lot funnier. I wish I had thought of it. But now I will tell it to people, claiming it as my own insouciant take on this serious film. Unless people start to hate me, then I’ll point my finger back at you, Frisoli.
Yes, but Ruth Gordon smashing in a Saudi terrorist’s head till the brains splashed out is a moment not to be missed.
bring it on, reynolds!
aah, Ruth Gordon…the only thing better is if she had shared the experience with Clyde the orangutan.
I know no one wants to see this, but it is shaping up to be one of the best films of 2006 (the outlook for the rest of the year is not promising). Click here to read Martin Amis discuss why this is one of the best films around. Stephen King said something similar in EW this week:
(his back page column is devoted to the film in this week’s edition). It’s a good film people.
Well, I need to see this flick, and it has seemed a weak year–even though, seeing so few, I can’t complain too much. But just from the page you noted, here’s a really intriguing flock of films on their way: A Scanner Darkly, maybe Pirates maybe Superman, Edmond, Little Miss Sunshine, The Science of Sleep, Talladega Nights, The Illusionist (?–but helluva cast), This Film is Not Yet Rated, Black Dahlia, All the King’s Men, Killshot, The Children of Men, Sicko, Marie Antoinette, The Prestige, The Fountain, The Departed, A Good Year, Casino Royale, Stranger than Fiction, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, Deja Vu, The Good German, Zodiac, Perfume, Let’s Go to Prison, Unaccompanied Minors, The Good Shepherd, Notes on a Scandal, Breaking and Entering.
And that’s just the stuff that leapt out at me. There’s a helluva lot of potential; in fact, I’m way more excited about September and after than I am about most of the summer slate.
let’s not forget nacho libre, which i am drawn towards like a fly to shit.
Okay, finally saw this. And, yeah–thrilling stuff. I would put the first hour up against the claustrophobic, fatalistic certainties of all your best closed-space horror films (from Alien to The Descent). And I’m kind of intrigued by the notions that this film somehow avoids exploitation, when it is so patently, prima facie reliant on our awareness of the grim violence ahead; we are there, we are engaged, because we already know that it’s a snuff film. We are going to see people die, and we are going to see how they die.
I guess I’m curious how we would draw distinctions between this ‘appropriate’ use of violence around a real event, and some alternative misappropriation. I haven’t a clue as to what technical details, or what audience cues/context, or what other than mere whim (however understandable the motives) makes this respectful and important rather than cheap or sleazy.
I say this as someone (often, irritatingly) vocal about his pleasures in sleaze, and his love of violence. I’m kind of dancing around my thesis, but: This is a good movie insofar as we admit to our illicit pleasures. It is a good movie because it expertly flaunts the exact same tension between discomfort (oh shit oh shit oh shit) and pleasure that your great thriller will.
A few stray comments–I’m really just trying to open a conversation about this, and/or about 9/11 representations (now and for the near future flooding the market):
–This film’s interest in verisimilitude makes me mighty suspicious. I go back to the Slate article Arnab linked above; while we might want as good skeptical critics to bash Oliver Stone’s more blatant “feel-good” version of the events, emphasizing the stark “realism” of Greengrass’ flick, I’d frankly prefer a representational style, and maybe even a narrative emphasis, that wasn’t trying so hard to make me forget I was seeing a movie… and yet so damned, and so effectively, intent on using the tools of the finest thrill-ride filmmaking.
–Don’t get me wrong–I *did* enjoy this. It is a good film. I’m still not sure it is, in fact increasingly certain it’s NOT, a good narrative about 9/11. What that might look like… Well, I’m interested in the problem of history, the problem of KNOWING–and while Jeff is right that 93 *does* avoid simple heroes and villains, it also is reliant on the flat simplicities of identification with almost every victim (the indirect confusion of the control towers as well as the more direct victims of violence on the plane) which presume a kind of knowledge–their experiences are held up to be so much like ours (watching our televisions) that we can almost see the event slipping away, that what is being celebrated (and not mourned) is the experience of watching 9/11. Nostalgia is not too strong a word here.
–I wonder if, in 10, 20 years, Greengrass’ film won’t grow on me. Its seeming “elision” of its thriller elements may be so much marketing/media context–the film, as ‘pure’ text, may survive and be read quite differently in a few years. In fact, if you stuck this in a time capsule with Air Force One, I think in one thousand years the viewers would be somewhat at a loss to define the distinctions.
Okay–the kid has awoken, so I’ll run. I’m curious about other such flicks: has anyone seen Stone’s film? Or The Great New Wonderful?
is it true that the united 93 plane was never found?! some friends told me that, and i can’t shake the impression that it is just another conspiracy theory. where the heck did the bloody plane go?
9/11 is the biggest bonanza for conspiracy folks since JFK.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09092006.html
i saw elvis flying united 93 recently. the funny thing is it was elvis grbac, erstwhile nfl quarterback.
yah, okay. i’ll read cockburn (i just learned that’s pronounced coh-burn). but did they find the plane or not?
I just saw this. The first hour, in fact everything that takes place off the plane, is amazingly good. The little snippets of everyday conversation, the utter chaos as different flight control centers try to figure out what is going on (all without ever really being at fault), the relentless build up of tension, the minimalism of the scenes, all give the movie both a documentary feel, and appear, at least, to strip it of commentary.
But the scenes on the plane after the hijackers take over seemed more contrived. The camera lingers on people weeping into their cell phones, the hijackers are wide-eyed but not much else. I guess I cannot strip away the politics from my appreciation of this film. The truth is that we have no idea what happened up on the plane beyond a few fragments from those who called home before it crashed. But we are so invested in there being heroes that day instead of just victims that this story about a passenger revolt has become a part of the narrative. By evoking the documentary form in the early scenes, when truth matters much less than getting the everyday rhythms right, the film glosses over the fact that the entire second half of the film is conjecture.
I think Chris is right about seeing this narrative of “revolt” as a means out of the sense of helplessness fostered by other narratives.
But a complementary–if seemingly contradictory–pleasure of the film (and… a brief digression:
I am going to insist on emphasizing the pleasures of this narrative, because I think that is what is being marketed, it’s what’s driving people to seek out these stories, and in the case of 93, as I wrote above, it’s crafted along the lines of other pleasurable entertainments. In short, I am loathe to buy into Amis’ or others’ arguments that this is an important film, in the sense of “important” trumping the “film” commodity being sold, and allowing us to sidestep our guilt about finding pleasure in these and other images/stories…)
in addition to selling a dream of resistance, the film also sells the delight in (passively) watching it all. There is something in our–or maybe it’s just my (but I doubt it)–attention to all the footage, all the stories, that hungers for more observation, more complete and total viewing. Perhaps it’s motivated by a sense that we want to know everything that happened. Maybe it’s an obsession about that one guy who fell, caught horribly and mysteriously on film (a story that got picked up here and then put out on dvd here). Or the conspiracy stuff.
But I called it nostalgia above: there was something about the experience of watching 9/11 that seems untainted by politics, doubt. It was purely affective–I mean, what was there to think about? I think 93 and its second half sells a return to that state of absorbed–yet distant–horrified watching; it may seek out a narrative of revolt, but its viewerly pleasures are tied to a “pure” acceptance of the images, which allows us to retreat from the confusions of post-9/11 geopolitical realities. I think, at least at this point in time, only an explicitly contrary narrative, one that resists our desires for observation and knowledge, would evoke any kind of contrary political consciousness.
how ’bout the plane? did they find it?
Yes–it was found by a team of scientists, led by Francois Truffaut, in the sand dunes of Mongolia.
Watch the skies!
I bought several pieces of the plane on ebay so I guess someone found it. There’s some kind of black box attached to a bit of metal. What do you think it’s for?
oh, thanks! i didn’t know they were selling pieces on ebay! i’m going to check if they are still available. that’s so cool.
what’s inside the black box?
just saw this. it seems better than the other one, Flight 93, made for tv. less sentimental, for one, which is both something i’m grateful for and something i feel gypped out of. i’m ashamed to admit it, but if United 93 gives pleasure and not knowledge (because it gives the same knowledge as Flight 93, so i already know all there is to know), then i want the whole nine yards, weepy parts too. i want to feel upset and not thrilled by the death and destruction of 9/11.
mike, you say:
are you saying that this is a film that stays away from politics? or, by “pure” acceptance of the images, you mean that we are not asked to question them even though they are clearly just speculation?
i agree with you about the nostalgia element — hard to watch this and not be back on my couch in my old apartment, my cat still alive, the tv droning on… actually, that got me a bit weepy. what is this? is the string being pulled the string of remembrance? “where were you when the twin towers…?”
and i also agree that there is a strong pleasure here in being the one who watches, the one who wasn’t but could easily have been on one of those planes, the one who is alive.
my head hurts from all the tension. this is one tense mothereffing film.
Gio–to answer your question, I meant the latter: the film’s political edge is to play *out as if* uninflected by politics.
As to your point about desiring catharsis: that’s what Jeff admired about the film, too–that it doesn’t depict the upset, horrified reactions of others to this flight’s demise, and so sidesteps that typical convention (where our emotional reactions are mapped explicitly for us). I still think it plays into, rather than against, the dominant 9/11 narratives circulating, but the distinctions between Greengrass’ film and others might be more significant than I was arguing.