Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is a frightening, disciplined reconstruction that deserves to be seen, though not casually. Its attention to people working through a crisis is patient and humane, but it tells us little about the hijackers’ motives.
Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is a film we recommend strongly, with the warning that its naturalism can make watching it acutely distressing. It reconstructs the hijacking of one of the four planes taken on 11 September 2001, keeping close to people facing events they cannot yet understand. Greengrass, who also wrote the screenplay, resists giving them the perspective that comes with knowing the history. At 111 minutes, it asks us to spend a sustained, uncomfortable stretch in their uncertainty.
The command-centre sequences are particularly effective because work continues while the situation becomes harder to grasp. Voices overlap, and the film makes listening itself difficult without making the people speaking seem foolish. We felt helpless during these exchanges, because we could hear people trying to understand a crisis whose significance we already knew. Greengrass lets their attempts to respond occupy the screen for long enough that the work itself becomes frightening.
Barry Ackroyd’s unsettled camera keeps us close enough to register the strain without settling into a comfortable view of it. The movement can be wearing, and there are moments when we would welcome a steadier look, but smoothness would also make this material easier to consume. Editors Clare Douglas, Christopher Rouse and Richard Pearson use the cross-cutting to keep separate efforts to comprehend the emergency in play. We have time to follow the work, even as the cutting denies us much relief from it.
Dominic Watkins makes the aircraft and command centres look like workplaces, which helps keep our attention on the people using them. John Powell’s score adds solemnity that we do not always need; we would have trusted those overlapping voices to carry still more of the strain. The film hardly needs encouragement to be upsetting. Even so, the craft generally avoids the grand presentation that could have made the reconstruction feel like an occasion for admiring the filmmakers.
The ensemble approach also matters. J.J. Johnson as Captain Jason M. Dahl and Gary Commock as First Officer LeRoy Homer belong to a film that gives professional roles more weight than star entrances. Polly Adams’s Deborah Welsh and Opal Alladin’s CeeCee Lyles fit the same restrained approach, in which speech sounds necessary rather than prepared for an audience. Their restraint makes the film’s view of ordinary people convincing, even when we learn little about them.
There is a cost to staying so close to the immediate emergency. Greengrass gives the hijackers too little beyond their part in it, and leaving their motives largely unexplored makes the film narrower than its seriousness might suggest. A reconstruction this convincing also risks being accepted as a complete account, when parts of it are necessarily speculative. We do not think either problem invalidates the film, but both should stop us treating it as a substitute for understanding the history.
As a historical thriller, it is unusually careful about the temptation to turn fear into excitement. The lack of jingoism matters, as does Greengrass’s reluctance to make ordinary behaviour sentimental. Those choices allow the distress to register without a speech explaining what we ought to feel. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and do not choose it simply because a thriller sounds relaxing.
